Thread 60896944

If I could convince my readers to do just one thing, it would be taking the Giving What We Can pledge. https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/pledge It’s a pledge to give away 10% of your earnings to effective charities, though you can give less if you want. You can also wait to give until you have a more significant income even if you sign the pledge. If you take the pledge and earn the income of the average American, you can save about a hundred lives over the course of your lifetime, and you can improve the conditions for hundreds of thousands of animals. And, of course, if you give to the shrimp, you can plausibly benefit hundreds of millions of them! https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-best-charity-isnt-what-you-think

I’ve taken the pledge https://benthams.substack.com/p/why-i-just-took-the-giving-what-we?utm_source=publication-search and think there are very strong moral reasons to do so. Money donated to effective charities does staggeringly large amounts of good! You personally can do as much good for the world as Ted Bundy did evil. You can save many people’s lives. I want to stress—this is a thing you can do right now, or later today, or tomorrow, and if you do it, many fewer people will die horribly. You can be the reason why hundreds of parents don’t have to bury a child, and hundreds of children get to live to an old age, when they otherwise wouldn’t have made it to their fifth birthday.

I think a lot of the reason people don’t take the pledge is that they just don’t want to give away a sizeable portion of their wealth. But some people have principled objections to taking the pledge. Most of the objections are easily addressed, so I thought I’d explain why I don’t think there are any good in-principle objections to giving away a bunch of money to effective charities.

>>60896944 (OP)
A first worry people have is that requiring them to take the pledge is too demanding. Just as you can’t be expected to give your life for a stranger, can you really be expected to give away 10% of your earnings purely for altruistic reasons? Can morality demand so much?

I think it can. First of all, I don’t actually think taking the pledge will make you less happy. Those who are more charitable tend to be happier, https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/rationales-for-giving/psychological/ even controlling for other things. Knowing that your life is meaningful, that you are making a difference to the lives of countless others, that you better the world with every dollar you earn, makes your life happier. Those who spend their dollars saving other people’s lives are more fulfilled than those who spend their dollars on watches, cars, and fancy vacations.

But also, I think morality does sometimes require you to make sacrifices for the sake of others. Other people matter! If you can spare them from a horrible and lethal fate for just a few thousand dollars, this seems like a good thing to do. The median American is vastly richer than almost anyone who ever lived—and almost at the top 1% of global wealth. https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/how-rich-am-i?income=70000&countryCode=USA&numAdults=1&numChildren=0 We currently live like kings in the Middle Ages. [YouTube] good time to be alive? (embed) Demanding that we abstain from luxuries of the sort that most of history couldn’t dream of to prevent many children from dying and many animals from being tortured doesn’t seem like a big ask.

Most importantly, you can think that taking the pledge is a good idea even if it’s not a moral requirement. Calling your mother is a nice thing to do. It’s not a moral obligation, but you should still do it if you haven’t recently. Even if you’re not obligated to give away money to effective charities, it’s still a really amazing opportunity to make the world a lot better.

>>60896950
It’s one thing to think morality doesn’t demand you give away all your wealth. That’s perfectly reasonable. But I think it’s clear that if donating can do huge amounts of good, then morality at least demands serious donations. It demands that one makes helping others effectively a non-trivial part of their life.

Imagine looking at this from the perspective of an animal on a factory farm or a child in a foreign country. These people know suffering of a sort that most of us can scarcely imagine. Does it really seem so demanding to ask us to make comparatively small sacrifices for their sake? Probably every single dollar we give away to effective animal charities prevents more suffering than all our lifetime donations will cost us. Certainly if we had the perspective of those helped by our donations, rather than exclusively our own, taking the pledge would seem like a no-brainer. Why does morality demand that they give up their lives, when the alternative is us abstaining from a nice vacation or an upgraded car?

Another objection: how do we know these charities are working? We’ve all heard about scam charities that pretend to do good but don’t really. Can we really trust these charities?

This is a reasonable concern to have, but fortunately there are very effective charities that have been extensively vetted. High quality randomized control trials—the gold standard in scientific evidence—have been carried out by experts, analyzing the effectiveness of charities. GiveWell has done extensive research https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities to identify the most effective charities. So while you should be skeptical if you hear about a random charity from your friend crackhead Bob who fell for eleven crypto-scams last year alone, GiveWell charities can be trusted. Similar points apply to charities helping animals, which have also been vetted by Animal Charity Evaluators. https://animalcharityevaluators.org/

>>60896970
Another concern: perhaps donating to effective charities that save lives will produce overpopulation. This will hold the nations they affect back economically and socially. Now, it is true that donating to life-saving charities likely raises the population somewhat, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2007.11388 but I don’t think this means that they’ll hold the affected nations back.

First of all, being stricken by horrendous diseases tends to hold nations back economically. This effect seems vastly more significant https://blog.givewell.org/2013/05/15/flow-through-effects/ than the negative economic impact of a slightly larger population, particularly because it’s not clear whether a larger population will develop more slowly or more quickly. America is better-off economically than we were in the 1800s, when the population was lower and disease was a greater burden.


Second, it looks like effective charities tend to lower the fertility rate somewhat but this effect is counterbalanced by the lives saved. But things go much better in society if fewer people are born and die, rather than if more people both are born and die. Vast amounts of resources are wasted if people die shortly after birth.


Third, if you’re concerned about this, just give to other charities. Give to charities that make people’s lives better—e.g. by curing blindness— https://www.givewell.org/charities/helen-keller-international or that help animals on factory farms. https://www.farmkind.giving/ If you end up concluding that charities saving lives are bad, then just give elsewhere! It would be shocking, and suspiciously convenient, if every single charity on the planet did more harm than good!

Not reading all that commie nonsense. Sage.

>give dying niggers a part of your income right now
No, I don't think I will.

>>60896980
Fourth, I find this idea pretty intuitively repugnant. Imagine that you could save an African child drowning in a pond. This line of reasoning would seem to imply that doing so would be actively bad because of the impact on overpopulation. This kind of reasoning is not something we’d normally take seriously. Suspiciously, it only crops up when people are justifying not giving away their money. Hmm…

Another concern: shouldn’t we donate locally? Why should we help people overseas when those around us are suffering?

The answer is that it’s much easier to help people overseas. Most of the people who have fallen through the cracks in wealthy country are hard to help. It’s hard to help a homeless person who is on the streets. In contrast, saving lives overseas is cheap and easy—it costs just around 5,000 dollars to save someone’s life. https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities Plausibly, therefore, giving overseas does tens or hundreds of times more good than donating locally. So unless people in your city matter hundreds of times more than people overseas, it’s probably better to donate overseas.

I also find the idea pretty weird that we have extremely strong obligations to the people around us rather than far away. If you could save someone drowning in a pond, would it matter how far away they were? Would it matter if they were an American citizen? If people in your country matter more than people in another country, then people start mattering way more after they fly in a plane and fill out paperwork to become a citizen. But that’s very unintuitive. The reasons to save your life shouldn’t change because you signed some paperwork! In fact, holding that we have strong duties to our countrymen that don’t apply to foreigners often implies https://benthams.substack.com/p/america-second?utm_source=publication-search we should perform actions that harm one person and benefit no one!

>>60896998
But even if you buy this argument, then just donate to local effective charities! You should still take the pledge, but just donate differently—maybe splitting your donations globally and locally.

A final concern: aren’t scholars unsure if foreign aid works? Aren’t there lots of smart people who think foreign aid backfires? If so, shouldn’t we be skeptical about efforts to provide foreign aid?

It’s true that some kinds of foreign aid are controversial among scholars. Some people think that economic development aid entraps countries and leaves them in poverty. But crucially, none of the kinds of foreign aid promoted by GiveWell are controversial. Among scholars, there is no serious debate about whether, say, anti-malarial bednets are good. https://blog.givewell.org/2015/11/06/the-lack-of-controversy-over-well-targeted-aid/ The most prominent critics of foreign aid support these kinds of programs. High quality studies have been done on them and have confirmed their efficacy. There is not serious room for doubt.

And, once again, if you’re concerned about this, just give to other charities, like the charities https://www.farmkind.giving/donate that prevent animals from languishing in a cage for ten years per dollar they raise. https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/lewis-bollard Or give to the organizations working to prevent the extinction of life on Earth. https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/charities/long-term-future-fund

In my view, there are not any decisive objections to taking the Giving What We Can pledge. https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/pledge It is very likely the best thing you will ever do, and because of it, plausibly hundreds fewer people will die and/or hundreds of thousands fewer animals will suffer horrors beyond comprehension. https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-bone-chilling-evil-of-factory

https://benthams.substack.com/p/every-objection-to-taking-the-giving

No, no one wants to donate because you're all fucking hypocrite parasites

if you really cared about any of the shit you scam donations for, like cancer, you'd get a part-time job or 2, get some education, even at a community college, so you can get a degree and move on to higher education, so you can study medicine, get a doctors degree and use your own money and time to help the cancer patients.

but you won't. because you just want to virtue signal that you feel sorry for these people, while you leech off the money of other people's labor

beg for donations for the poverty stricken? how about you start a business, take the time and effort to grow it big, and donate your business earnings as donation? you won't bc you're all filthy parasitic hypocrites

Fuck niggers

I pledge to NOT give away jack-shit to worthless third worlders.

>>60897007
80,000 hours movement?
>Effective altruists often advocate for donating a significant portion of their income to effective causes, with some pledging to give all income above a certain threshold, like $40,000, adjusted for inflation. This approach encourages individuals to earn more while ensuring that their excess income contributes to impactful charitable efforts.

>>60896944 (OP)
stfu im not funding your compromised ngo (for profit) charity scam. if i were to give 1/10th (a biblical tithe) its going to be to my Orthodox Christian parish not to some globohomo scam that keeps 97% of proceeds while funding bill gates and euthanasia for overpopulation

alright whose the jackass who smuggled a phone into prison so sbf can shitpost his 20+ years of effective assfucking away?

I actually do wish I was in the position to give away some of my income. I sometimes dream of winning the lottery and giving a lot of way to good causes. But I need every cent right now.

>>60897073
Need is a strong word. Obviously children getting malaria needed to have a bednet to prevent them from getting malaria in the first place

Why?
The government already steals my money to give to non whites

>>60897090
Your tax dollars are funding a genocide.
Donations to against malaria foundation don't.

>>60896944 (OP)
>(YOU) are evil if you don't donate enough
If your goal was to antagonize everyone of the 2.5 people posting here, you've achieved it by being a karen.

>>60897096
the israel-gaza war is brown people genociding other brown people, I don't care about that
I was referring to the government stealing my money to give to brown invaders living in my country

>>60896944 (OP)
>imagine thinking someone is going to donate money
>imagine thinking someone would actually read all that bullshit

>>60897080
See that’s the thing. People suffer. They will always suffer. They will continue to suffer. Why don’t we all just give away all of our money, rob our own futures to stop what has occurred since the beginning of time?

This reminds me of how I’d always be the kind one to smoke people up, first round on me at the bars, lending small sums of money that would never get paid back. I don’t regret it, but what did it do? Not much but leave me in a worse financial position.

>>60896944 (OP)
MORE NIGGERS!! WE NEED YOUR MONEY TO MAKE MORE NIGGERS RIGHT NOW!!
ALL DAY EVERY DAY, WE NEED TO MAKE MORE NIGGERS!
NIGGERS IN YOUR COUNTRY, NIGGERS IN YOUR NEIGHBOURHOOD!
NIGGERS AT YOUR JOB! NIGGERS IN YOUR SCHOOL!

SEND US MONEY NOW!

>>60897096
Good! This is why i pay taxes