Edit: The match seems to now be over - the funds were expended in around 35 minutes. But many of these charities are great and should be supported regardless!
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On October 22nd starting at 10:00am Pacific Time, Every.org is matching donations to select animal welfare organizations at a 2:1 rate, up to $2,000 per donor per nonprofit (so if you give up to $2,000, they will contribute up to $4,000 and the nonprofit will get up to $6,000). The first donation a donor makes to each el...
Crossposted to Less Wrong
‘Like most of life’s dangers, the dangers of artificial intelligence are not easily identified from the armchair.’
J Dmitri Gallow
Epistemic status
I’m not an expert in this field, and herein I make some sweeping generalisations educated guesses about the overall...
Why you, as a 25 y/o should write a Will
You might die. If you did, would your money go to your feelings-over-facts relative who thinks a Humane Society is the same thing as the Humane League? Would this be in accordance with your values?
The SSA’s Life Tables tell us that if you are 25, you have an annualized chance of death of 1.8 in 1,000. I don’t know how much money you have, but let’s be generous and say you have $100k.
0.0018 (annual chance of death) / 12 = 0.00015 monthly
0.00015*$100,000 = $15/month
Would you bother to cancel a subscription that charged you $15 per month? What if you knew you’d have to cancel it eventually and that it would become more expensive every day you lived?
My lawyer says it can be as easy as filling in his template. Could this be worth 30 minutes?
I remember wondering the same a few years ago, and I came to the opposite conclusion. I think the biggest differences in my reasoning were:
Also quickly noting that you're using the annualized chance of death for males in the US, but a significant percentage of EA Forum readers are women, so have less than half the mortality rate between 15 and 37, and/or live in countries with a much lower youth mortality risk (e.g.in the UK it's 0.6 per 1,000 25 y/o males, in Italy 0.4, in the Netherlands 0.4 if I'm interpreting this correctly, I expect Germany and other European countries to be similar, Canada 0.97, Australia 0.6)
I think this post's argument assumes your $100k is lost by default if you don't have a will, but on a quick GPT-5 query it looks like in the UK it goes to your spouse, parents, siblings or siblings' children, and in California something similar. Assuming you're survived by a spouse or these family members and you're happy with your assets going to them then it seems like it's not the same as cancelling a $15/mo subscription. (But plausibly still worth it, I think it just needs a bit more explanation!)
Yes good point. Was thinking of this as "how many potential QUALYs would be lost if your money went to your not-so-EA relatives". But yes, if you think they would spend the money wisely then this makes sense.
I've wondered about this, so thank you for thinking this up and calculating! Considering how I did about as much work this past week to get a $3 monthly subscription cancelled, this is kind of genius.
Update: if most of your assets are in stocks or something like that, the easiest thing might be to quickly update your beneficiary information on your account.
This might end up covering enough of your assets such that the will is unnecessary.