This is a special post for quick takes by Kevin Xia 🔸. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
I am sure someone has mentioned this before, but…
For the longest time, and to a certain extent still, I have found myself deeply blocked from publicly sharing anything that wasn’t significantly original. Whenever I have found an idea existing anywhere, even if it was a footnote on an underrated 5-karma-post, I would be hesitant to write about it, since I thought that I wouldn’t add value to the “marketplace of ideas.” In this abstract concept, the “idea is already out there” - so the job is done, the impact is set in place. I have talked to several people who feel similarly; people with brilliant thoughts and ideas, who proclaim to have “nothing original to write about” and therefore refrain from writing.
I have come to realize that some of the most worldview-shaping and actionable content I have read and seen was not the presentation of a uniquely original idea, but often a better-presented, better-connected, or even just better-timed presentation of existing ideas. I now think of idea-sharing as a much more concrete, but messy contributor to impact, one that requires the right people to read the right content in the right way at the right time; maybe even often enough, sometimes even from the right person on the right platform, etc.
All of that to say, the impact of your idea-sharing goes much beyond the originality of your idea. If you have talked to several cool people in your network about something and they found it interesting and valuable to hear, consider publishing it!
Relatedly, there are many more reasons to write other than sharing original ideas and saving the world :)
Relatedly, I often find there is some concept I want to be able to reference, but it's scattered in pieces across four different articles/books, so I find myself writing an article whose only contribution is to put all those pieces together in one place.
100% agree, this is the case for most (if not all) of my forum posts! Even if I do have some idea which even borders on original, its only a very small percent of the write up. If we look at popular non-fiction books, most present old ideas in an original way. Classic examples of people who do this well...
Noah Yuvral Harari - I excitedly recommended "Sapiens" to my wife. She stopped reading halfway through.... "This is just Anthropology 101 hyped up" :D :D :D
Malcolm Gladwell also does a great job of this.
I took the 10% Pledge earlier this year, but was contemplating it a lot for a while before. After taking the pledge, I noticed a couple of insights that I think would have probably made me pledge earlier. I think these insights most directly apply to people who were in a similar situation as I was[1]- but they might be useful for others as well:
- You don’t have to donate 10% right away. Today (!) I learned that "while studying or unemployed, it is within the spirit of the Pledge to give 1% of spending money instead of the income-based pledge amount" and the 10% kicks in once you start earning a stable income. When I first learned about the pledge, I was still at uni and thought I should wait until I had a full-time job and some comfortable savings. However, even if I were already full-time employed at the time and wouldn’t donate at all for the next 4 years, I’d only have to donate ~11%[2] for the rest of my career to compensate for the lack of donations over my lifetime. As someone having a ~median income in a high-income country, I believe that 11% is very doable. In fact (hot take!) I believe that 15-20% should be the norm for people in my situation.
- 10% is not as much as you might think. I think for me, there was a strong anchoring effect here - in my city, most people I know donate something like 30-50€ a month, so 10% (100+ €/month at the time I learned about the pledge) felt like a huge step. Instead of pledging, I decided to just donate what I could “easily miss”. This included instances in which I surprisingly saved money, birthday and Christmas gifts and occasionally deliberate decisions to not purchase “luxuries”. Tracking all of these was a bit tedious, but it showed me how I could easily donate more than 10%, by reframing my donations around what I could genuinely “easily” give away, instead of seeing it in relation to what other people give.
- Nowadays I'd recommend people to take the trial pledge, but doing so at 10% for say 6-12 months. My impression (out of my social bubble) is that many people take the trial pledge for 1%; which isn't bad, but it doesn't really give you a "trial" of what the 10% pledge would practically look like.
- Probably, the earlier you pledge the better. I have always been a bit of a nerd for social psychology and social norm-setting; and I think there is a plausible case to be made that the earlier you can help cultivate a norm, the more important it becomes to do so. I think Misconception #4 in this post (strongly recommended read!) summarizes the case quite well. Relatedly, as you move through life, you’ll probably always find a reason not to pledge yet - whether you are waiting to enter your first full-time career, building up your safety net, facing a career transition, saving for your first own house, etc.
My tentative conclusion from all of this is that, assuming you expect to have a ~normal salary for the majority of your career and live in a high-income country, it is probably not too early to pledge.
- ^
Part-time student in a high-income country, no real financial risk, because parents are sufficiently well off, expected to earn at least a median income over my lifetime.
- ^
Assuming a forty-year career with the same income - but likely, your income would increase throughout your career and it would be less than 11%.
I’d love to dig a bit more into some real data and implications for this (hence, just a quick take for now), but I suspect that (EA) donors may not take the current funding allocation within and across cause areas into account when making donation decisions - and that taking it sufficiently into account may mean that small donors shouldn’t diversify?
For example, the recent Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week posed the statement “It would be better to spend an extra $100m on animal welfare than on global health.” Now, one way to think through this question is “How would the ideal funding split between Animal Welfare vs. Global Health look like” and test whether an additional $100m on Animal Welfare would bring us closer to the ideal funding split (in this case, it appears that spending the $100m on Animal Welfare increases the share of AW from 0.41% to 0.55% - meaning that if your ideal funding split would allocate more than 0.55% to AW, you should be in favor of directing $100m there).
I am not sure if this perspective is the right or even the best to take, but I think it may often be missing. I think it’s important to think through it, because it takes into account “how much money should be spent on X vs. Y” as opposed to “how much money I should spend on X vs. Y” (or maybe even “How much money should EA spend on X vs. Y”?) - which I think closer to what we should care about. I think this is interesting, because:
- If you primarily, but not strictly and solely favor a comparably well-funded area (say, GHD or Climate Change), you may want to donate all your money towards a cause area that don’t even value particularly highly.
- Ironically, this type of thinking only applies if you value diversification in your donations in the first place. So, if you are wondering how much % of your money should go to X vs. Y, I suspect that looking at the current global funding allocation will likely (for most people, necessarily?) lead to pouring all your money into one cause (probably the more neglected one). The exception being that your donations can sufficiently change global funding allocation beyond what you’d favor…
- This would then suggest that there may not really be a case left for any small donor to diversify their donations? (I think this conclusion would be.. kind of strong? I am hesitant to draw it from the sort of quick thinking that went into this, but I think it’s fascinating!)
I agree that diversification may not make sense for most small donors! Some arguments in favor and against this position can be found in this topic, if you are interested.
I took the 10% Pledge earlier this year, but was contemplating it a lot for a while before. After taking the pledge, I noticed a couple of insights that I think would have probably made me pledge earlier. I think these insights most directly apply to people who were in a similar situation as I was[1]- but they might be useful for others as well:
My tentative conclusion from all of this is that, assuming you expect to have a ~normal salary for the majority of your career and live in a high-income country, it is probably not too early to pledge.
Part-time student in a high-income country, no real financial risk, because parents are sufficiently well off, expected to earn at least a median income over my lifetime.
Assuming a forty-year career with the same income - but likely, your income would increase throughout your career and it would be less than 11%.