dan.pandori's Quick takes

[6] If strange situations result in me saving money having more net-expect-impact this year than donating, I'm allowed to do so. Didn't expect this to come up. Less than a 1% increase in savings, I won't beat myself up about it.

I think this is so awesome, and I hope I can make a similar pledge someday, if I achieve enough financial security. 

I'm kinda curious how frugally you live with 5%. A concern I have is that as I get older, the lifestyles of those around me improve (since they have more money) and so it's quite hard not to raise my standards as well. 

Also I guess you have no concerns about potentially having to support family?

The kind of grifting that most concerns me within EA would result in a lot of fudging and inflation around reported impact in order to gain money & status. I think the hardest thing is fake, and the main thing we care about protecting, is real, verifiable impact. If there is an influx of money into EA, I would want the first thing to be done is to undertake a lot of new, third-party evaluation with depth. This is not happening today and I have not seen great plans to do so right now.

Here's another list from Caroline Ellison during the FTX times on valuable signals: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/M44i4CiMECP5Xoorz/demandingness-and-time-money-tradeoffs-are-orthogonal (which I'm not sure I agree with, but I found interesting)

I personally think people worry disproportionately about grift on the EA Forum, while implementation challenges and other considerations seem to be bigger risks in practice. (e.g. I don't think the Wytham project or Dispensers for Safe Water would have been more successful if they had been assigned to more vegan or more frugal people)

I agree with all of this. One thing missing is just joining AIS/EA before it was cool/got much more money. 

Feels like most of these except the kidney are fairly easily faked or not that relevant. Community engagement and working for your own non-profit are about the first thing anyone seeking to grift will do, as well as people who are sincere (including as others have pointed out, the people who are sincerely wrong)

And Sam Bankman Fried was a vegan who apparently started off with a completely sincere desire to work for animal nonprofits. Treating these as signals and the people complaining about his behaviour and some of the things he said as noise was a bad move.

 

Maybe there are other signals that aren’t vulnerable to the same kind of faking, like evidence of integrity and discretion paired with a track record of impact of the type you’re looking for. Seems harder to easily evaluate, but also seems like a more common way to evaluate alignment with a cause’s mission. 

Separately, while I’m vegan myself, I think using veganism as a signal is less reliable than it may appear because it appears not to meet the same effectiveness bar as other popular interventions, and there’s honest disagreement within EA on whether EAs should generally follow a vegan diet. I think I’d have the same concerns with using other marginally good but costly lifestyle choices, like donating a kidney, as a signal as well, though I haven’t thought about a lot of individual cases. 

"If you do direct work, the psychological default every day is to wake up and do work. You are surrounded by people who think the work is important, and whose moral values at least rhyme with your own." 

This is true for me, and true for many in richer countries sucha as the awesome AIM crew. In low-income countries though many if not most employees (especially in BINGOS) are there for the money and status in non-profits, rather than the value of the work. I know a number of Ugandans who have found this difficult when they cared about the work while their colleagues were just trying to weasel away as much money on allowances as they could while trying to unnecessarily extend projects to keep their salary going. 

I think your major point stands, but direct work doesn't universally come with motivated and encouraging peers.

I'm EtG and would love to connect with others. My DMs are open! A bit about me: I'm a SWE based in Europe, and my preferred cause area is animal welfare.

We have a regular EtG meetup in London. You might be interested in setting up something similar where you live, perhaps branching off a preexisting Effective Giving/Giving What We Can group?

Besides my more cold-hearted response below: I agree that EtG is lonely. You are lucky if you have one other EtG'er in the same city. EtG is rare. EtG and feeling committed to it, is even rarer.

You don't need to make a donation decision biweekly. That sounds incredibly tiring. You can also set up a recurring donation to the same charity or fund. Or save up and donate once or twice a year. That has the advantage that you can plan some time to think well about your decision.

Would you be comfortable sharing what opportunities you gave to, broadly speaking?