Saturday, April 15, 2023

How Much Do You Owe the World?

     How do you determine how much to donate? This is a very complicated question. You should save for retirement, provide for your family, and save money for emergencies. Also, you should absolutely spend money on yourself and your happiness. Not just for some overly robotic reason such as "make sure you spend money on yourself so that you feel happy and continue to donate," but also because it is legitimately your right to spend money on yourself. It is not evil for you to dine at a nice restaurant, or spend a hundred dollars on roulette in Vegas, or buy a boat. Yes, you could probably instead donate that money to an effective charity. Yes, you could probably save someone's life with the money you spent on alcohol this year. But we need to be reasonable. You didn't cause the world's problems, you didn't create malaria and you didn't invent death. Also, it's extremely hard to make a positive impact with donations, and there is absolutely no certainty that anything you do contributes positive to the world over the long term. Maybe the child you cure of malaria grows up to be a warlord and unleashes a pathogen on a rival community that kills thousands. Maybe the alignment research you contribute to leads to a faster timeline to ASI, and without this quickened pace humanity would have solved alignment. We need to understand how limited the information we have is, and we have to be comfortable making decisions in situations of extreme uncertainty.

    While it is very unlikely that the drowning child that you save grows up to be a serial killer, it is still possible. So, should you let the child drown? That would be ridiculous. It's very, very easy to live a selfish life. Maybe all the excuses you are making for walking past the drowning child (well we don't really know what will happen, it's just natural selection preventing overpopulation, someone else will probably save him) are just that, excuses. I don't think you owe strangers your entire life. Read the book Strangers Drowning for a first-hand look about how miserable living your life entirely for others could make you. Still, we obviously owe something. I think that the 10% of your income is a pretty good metric. We also want to make sure we are living enviable lives, and it's hard to convince others to follow you if you are living in poverty because of your donations. Look at the life of Jesus, and then look at the lives of the typical Christian American. "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God". Has there ever been a more thoroughly ignored statement? 

    We should be practical when designing our giving pledges. We want to leave room for humanity and avoid cold-hard calculation. Not only is a life of "give everything, even the shirt off your back to the poor" unlikely to persuade others, it is also probably not morally required. You don't owe everything to the world, but you probably owe more than you are currently contributing. If you live your life believing this you will probably wind up doing a lot of good.

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