Been to 3 EAGs as a student myself and I strongly agree with this post. 

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. 

Instance of Eliezer X-Risk Communication #47

"Imagine there was a grasshopper, and then a bumblebee. And imagine the grasshopper was 120 IQ in grasshopper-normalized intelligence. Then imagine a millionaire sycophant (grown, not built) that the grasshopper trusts pushes a TEN-THOUSAND POUND Diamondoid Bacteria off of a skyscraper--AND EVERYONE DIES".

Epistemic Status: Joke

In theory, this seems important and worth considering. Another effect that might pull in the opposite direction:

As we learn more about effective causes we are able to identify more effective solutions/issue areas. 

It's not obvious which effect (or something else) will dominate. One way we might be able to acertain the answer to this is to look at the effectiveness of Givewell's top charities across time. My understanding is this hasn't moved much, but also that their definitions of "life saved" has changed across time. Unsure which direction that might affect things.

I don't think I have a good objection here. 

1) You could make an objection about value drift and this should influence you to donate now, but I don't think this gets to the heart of the issue.

2) If now is the "hinge of history", maybe it is a uniquely good time to do longtermist philanthropy.

However, if we believe neartermist work is pressing enough to justify funding as well, it seems like patient philanthropy is pretty much a pareto improvemnt over normal neartermist philanthropy. 

Would any justification for neartermist philanthropy change this?

Thanks for your support!

Thinking about your "all years" question: Last year, our club skewed heavily toward freshmen, as did this year. At Purdue, many upperclassmen don't really look to join new clubs. For this reason, I'm not too excited about this explanation.

Yes, really uncertain on the poster thing, but it's a good point.

JLDC,

Thank you for your insightful comment. 

1. Below is the breakdown of who filled out our application in the callout for both years. This would notably be the sample of the most interested members. Small sample size and hard to draw conclusions here.

2. Very interesting idea here! Thanks for bringing it up. The only thing is, about 2,000 people heard the pitch, maybe 1,000 of which were freshmen. This means we reached about 10% of the freshman population. I would expect the affect you described to happen, just not sure if it would be of a very high magnitude at all. 

3. I agree with this. However, it would be very hard for me to believe that our outreach strongly filtered for interest levels this year, even though it wasn't substantially different in style than in the past. 

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. 

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?

Great guys great post.

Purdue EA has likely been inspired to try the back-to-back model.