Hi there, I’m noticing a spate of pieces recently making similar claims about the efficacy of carbon offsets: yours, Scott Alexander’s the other day and Connor Jennings recent post.
I would suggest folks be *much* more skeptical about cheap carbon offsets. Most of them are basically useless and operate more like religious indulgences. Failure points include additionality, leakage and especially permanence.
Regarding the latter, when I take a flight or use fossil fuel energy in any other way, I am removing carbon that was permanently sequestered underground and introducing it to the atmosphere and ocean. The downfall of most carbon credits and all of the cheap ones is that they merely bind up carbon temporarily in the form of biomass (forest management, tree planting etc) and therefore are not offsetting like with like.
The only worthwhile carbon credits are those that lead to verified permanent sequestration geologically by binding the carbon up with minerals underground or in the ocean. From what I can tell the cost of these methods is still on the order of hundreds of dollars per tCO2.
I think it’s really important to clear the air on this ☺️
What about direct carbon capture donations? (Is that what you mean by your last paragraph?) my boyfriend works in electric charging R&D and he says much the same about carbon offsets but donates to direct carbon capture
Yes, you would have to look at their scheme and see that there’s some good evidence that they’re capturing on a net basis what they are claiming and that it’s being sequestered for a 1000+ years. Ideally these programs would be independently audited on something like that basis.
I do not but I wonder @Zeke Hausfather if this wouldn’t make for a good topic you to address in a post: the variability of carbon offsets on the market, what to look for in a when choosing one and any specific examples people can look at.
Okay, I think I pretty strongly disagree, but perhaps I am misunderstanding. If the claim is that people should just donate more if you're interested in EA but not really invested enough to feel like you want to dedicate a bunch more time to it, then I agree with that.
I think the idea that people _should_ angle for earning-to-give instead of EA jobs is basically wrong though. I think if you're really interested in EA and competent, you should angle for an EA job. The case for this is basically very simple. Your money often goes to people who distribute it/allocate it/research the most effective ways to donate/do good things with it, and having amazing people in all those roles is also very very important. Money is only as good as what it's spent on, and I think this analysis misses that.
I mean, there's a reason why many organizations say they feel more "talent-constrained" than "funding-constrained" (though of course, many places are basically both talent and funding constrained to some extent). If you have the capacity to earn $1M in Jane Street, but instead spend your time working on how to most effectively distribute malaria nets in Africa, that can be _super high impact_, power-laws rule everything around me. Even within charities, the difference between an okay hire, a good hire, and a great hire are all massive!
And also if you actually want to earn to give, you should try hanging around in SF to roll the dice on early high-performing startups, since upside potential is just so massive there, so it's a much higher EV play (and tax is less for selling stocks afaik).
EDIT: okay actually I googled the stats on this, it was a cached thought I had once at a party, and maybe it's about the same. But does depend on what the downside risk is, since if the downside is "you just earn to give in a regular tech job anyway" then maybe it still makes sense, idk?
Oh I would love to go do that, but H1B legislation and being european makes it harder
The central argument indeed is that most people should earn to give, unless you have good reasons to believe you would be exceptional in something in
I think this is true if the following 3 criteria are met:
1) People are donating a very high amount of money to EA causes (not sure how true this is would have to check the numbers)
2) You have strong reasons to believe you would be very good at a high impact EA researchesque job. (I don't think it follows that most people good at SWE or math fall into this camp, but maybe I don't know what values matter here)
3) if ur research concludes things EAs will follow (this is basically true)
4) A ton of people in EA jobs seem to be in EA jobs because it's emotionally draining for them not to be in a job that directly does good. So probably don't get an EA job if you are not like that.
Okay this probably makes sense, but tbh I think many people who can do okay at jobs in incredibly demanding industries (e.g. HRT, Jane street) can probably also be super agentic and effective employees of high-impact charities - but I would change my mind if I were wrong about this and they are actually easily replaceable.
I think this falls into a bit of a failure mode at extremes. A large proportion of eggs in shops are now not from battery chickens, because there is consumer demand. Similarly, most nice chocolate is fairtrade because of consumer demand. It's less efficient to buy fairtrade or free range than just to donate the difference to a very effective charity, but if lots of people buy fairtrade, it has an effect on industry incentives. If a lot of people go vegan, this encourages companies to invest in meat alternatives, and to green wash themselves in ways that may have some benefits. Plus, if consumers showed they were happy to live with slight reductions in quality of consumption in order to help the planet, this would perhaps let politicians know that suggesting this wouldn't be career suicide. I think if you buy anything with an "ethical" label, you agree with this already to some extent - the premium for ethical could always be given to a more efficient cause, but you'd lose something if everyone did.
Yes, even if one entirely agrees with the arguments in the post, those are only good for maximizing individual impact. But as a general rule to promote to a larger community, it seems sub-optimal to me. It would be perpetuating the status quo. Although I do think that if the money is donated not just to effective charities with direct impact but also to orgs and people who have a shot at achieving systemic change, thus reducing the reliance of certain high impact interventions on private funding, I would be more easily on board.
EA was very earning-to-give focused in the early days and shifted more towards direct work over time because a lot of smart EAs thought hard about this and did the math. Income taxes, payroll taxes, health insurance, transaction costs... that adds up.
Two more factors I personally think matter:
(1) some people are going to be more motivated and work harder doing direct work vs. working in finance. For some it's the opposite. Stereotype meme example: a turbo-autist will probably do more good working in tech and donating so NTs can do lobbying work. But it's good to have NTs in EA too.
(2) With direct work you see the bottlenecks directly because you are working on them everyday. That may help allocate effort better than donating. But EA orgs seem pretty competent and aligned so low-confidence on this one.
I do think Scott's genius-saint-everyone-else trichotomy is too simplified. A lot of what looks like genius is deep domain expertise from persistence and hard work over decades.
The atmosphere in US EA in the 2010s was closer to what you believe in. E-to-G and in particular one's donation amount carried higher social status. I think there were also non-math reasons why things changed in the 2020s: selection effects for who got into EA due to status signaling cascades, and FTX. Global politics looked different, and people, including me, had more confidence in the long-term positive externalities of rowing1 for global capitalism.
Personally, in 2025, I think the best long-term options for animal welfare are:
a. working in AI and advocating internally at your company to make the AI care more about animals (very low confidence on tractability). Or just rowing for Anthropic.
b. direct work on cellular agriculture
but earning to give is probably underrated for people who have comparative advantage in a high-earning technical field, and don't get lonely in a standard corporate atmosphere.
I don't know if you would like it but do you know the book Strangers Drowning? It's one of my favorite books ever and there is early EA lore/vibes in there that you don't get in the usual internal community channels.
It's a bit strange because it's a New Yorker journalist writing the profiles so the overall frame is influenced by common-sense morality and like NT-writer emotions. But you can always skip the non-EA chapters.
It's on my very long TBR. I am very interested in it but feel that it wouldn't teach me much new and I would already agree with it, but should probably check it out regardless.
I agree with the core point that money is a powerful lever and that earning to give is underrated. If you can earn a lot without burning out or hollowing yourself out, donating is obviously one of the most effective ways to reduce suffering.
Where I disagree is the implied conclusion that this should be the dominant life strategy, or that ethics collapses into a single-objective optimization problem.
Taken seriously, this framing leaves very little room to actually live. Enjoyment, exploration, curiosity, and following idiosyncratic interests become morally suspicious unless they cash out in donations later. That's not just demanding, it's a very thin model of human flourishing.
It also assumes people are mostly interchangeable units of output: "pick something, get good, get paid." But novelty doesn't come from optimization strategies. Rather it comes from people following weird, non-obvious interests before anyone knows they matter.
Geniuses aren't born, but they also aren't produced by telling everyone to maximize salary first and meaning later. A framework that discourages exploration selects against exactly the kinds of trajectories that later have outsized impact.
I'm also uneasy with the idea that you can cleanly outsource ethics to donation while treating the rest of life as morally neutral. What you spend 40/50 hours a week doing shapes your values, attention, and the futures you imagine. Money can correct outcomes, but it doesn't cancel formative effects.
So my gripe isn't with donating or caring about consequences. It's with turning utilitarianism into a totalizing worldview that crowds out other legitimate ways of contributing, creating, exploring, building strange things, or simply living a life that isn't constantly justified by a spreadsheet.
Earning to give is one powerful tool. Treating it as the answer is where I think this becomes lazy.
Sure, if you're reducing it for engagement and shareability, that makes sense. In that sense, it's a utilitarian act. I don't actually think your point doesn't stand, by the way.
My issue is more that taking this viewpoint to its absolute implications leads to some pretty absurd outcomes, which end up undermining the logical case for utilitarianism itself.
This reasoning applies well to problems that are solvable with current technology and don’t require technical breakthroughs.
Inoculating thousands of children against malaria only requires buying vaccines from pharma companies and recruiting people to inject them - a task anyone can easily learn, and that a lot of people in developing countries will execute for a much cheaper salary than you.
In that case, yes, unless you’ve got a totally new vision of how to organize a team of vaccine-providers for multiplied efficiency or you know how to produce a vaccine multiple times cheaper, your best way to have impact is probably to just donate.
But if you care about technical problems, the reasoning changes.
It’s never obvious in retrospect whether technical solutions scale better with money or with people.
My guess is that you have some classes of problems where, for a given number of players, having more teams to explore different directions of the solutions space is strictly superior to having more capital allocated in between the players.
Another solution, that I often saw in entrepreneurship circles, is to earn not to give but to fund your self-exploration and/or your own bets.
In risky fields, with highly uncertain returns but very high upsides, the number of parallel bets can matter a lot - but most institutional investors will reduce risk, bet on consensual innovation, with short-term returns.
This is where the hybrid strategy of earning to invest can really shine.
This article is silly. It's like saying "hey, if you accept that ethics is entirely about impact then the stuff EAs do is the best at impact"
But most critics of EA deny that impact is the only thing you should care about to begin with. So this article doesn't address the fundamental claim of the non-EAs.
Me feeling better now for not having an EA job but having already signed the GWWC pledge :)
But I think donating money is also trying to be a “good person,” especially if you try to donate all your money above a certain threshold, rather than donate a percentage of your total money like most EAs do.
Strongly disagree that people shouldn’t apply to “direct work” roles and just focus on earning to give (if that’s your thesis)
As an example, I'm confident that there are software developers who would have been significantly more impactful than me at my role at GWWC, but didn't apply, and the extra ~$/year that they are donating (if they are actually donating more in practice than what they would have) does not compensate for that.
I also think that there's a good chance that I would have done other vaguely impactful work, or donated more myself, if they had been hired instead of me, largely compensating for their missed donations.
I think EAs overestimate the effects of replaceability in direct work roles, and it can cause jobs at highly impactful organizations to filled by mediocre candidates (like me) when having more and better people doing direct work would be much more impactful.
No they just like to pretend they do to justify bullshit high paying jobs because this way people « can do good » while not actually doing anything worthwhile.
It’s basically like Apple pretending to care for the planet because they remove the charger from their phone while still renewing the thing every year to promote sales.
It’s profoundly dishonest argument/behavior and it’s actually disgusting they try to pretend they can be one of the good ones this way.
I used to think this. Worked for a quant firm. Discovered white collar crime and quit. Now strongly anti-recommend. Being in an environment like that will gradually normalise things that affect your psyche in ways most people don't have the self awareness to understand. People are complicated and being a conventionally good person (virtue ethics, even if it's dumb sounding) has a lot of knock on positive effects you mightn't expect.
I think a lot of people are pretty skeptical about carbon offsets--are they really going to make the transition from fossil fuels to renewables, or are they just going to swell some carbon-offset company's bottom line? It looks too easy and at some point you have to actually do the technically and logistically complicated work of increasing renewable capacity, which is much harder in the current political climate.
Also, people have evolved mental circuitry for detecting people trying to look good while doing bad, as it is a VERY old problem--your great-great-[100x]-great-granddad had to worry about someone claiming they did all the work hunting the mammoth while they were actually sitting at camp. I think 'earn to give' and carbon offsets both set off those alarms even if they kind of make sense. Someone who decides to pursue a career that makes $500K a year and then donates half of it to charity is still pulling in $250K after all is said and done, and even if $150K goes to taxes...well, you're still making $100K a year, which isn't too bad, *and* if things get rough you can always drop your charity. Compare that with someone who goes to make $60K as a teacher and can't easily make more money if they need it (precarity is a big problem in the middle and lower classes).
Also it's irrational but you shouldn't discount the effects of high-profile cases like SBF, who was a big proponent of it.
Also most people spend most of their day doing their job, so for an idealistic person having to spend 50-60 hours a week helping rich people get richer is very unpleasant. They'd rather spend that in a job that they feel has meaning even if on some theoretical optimization level they should make as much as possible and convert it into a good cause.
The ‘problem’ with this line of thinking (consequentialism) is that ultimately it boils down to - the best person is one who earns most money. Because earning itself creates the most value
Stupid argument. Doing good isn’t something you can remove from morals, which are not universal and have definitions that are very localized.
It’s pretending as if helping save random animals is as important as not enslaving your fellow humans that will have to work their ass off to pay for the bullshit finance job.
That’s just extremely dumb.
I can assure you that if you are an asshole making hundred of thousands off the back of honest workers, no amount of giving to whatever bullshit cause, « managed » by a no less bullshit org (that is very likely to be corrupt) is going to move the scale meaningfully.
If you want to do good, become a doctor and consult for free or something.
You should stop peddling bullshit to rationalize predatory behavior.
The against malaria foundation is ran by very dedicated people and gets audited regularely
And no, saving animals is not as important as "not enslaving your fellow human" but there is a point where saving animals becomes so cheap <--> helping human very expensive (incl second order) that you should probably consider the animal instead
Why do you think being a doctor consulting for free has less impact than a doctor charging out the ass in a rich ass neighbourhood and then gettin thousands of kids vitamin A so they don't go blind!?
Starting a company is so much higher expected value. Go through charity entrepreneurship if you're good enough to work at Jane Street. Make the next lead elimination project. Start a political consulting company. Start a think tank. Think critically about counterfactuals and how you can steer big systems. Far more effective.
From the conclusion section of this article, written from the perspective of someone who would be a typical person admitted to the aim (charity entrepreneurship) program and had just started a small charity (most people who get in do succeed in doing this):
"When I try to model all these factors out in the following Guesstimate model, I get an estimate that the total efforts of our team (including senior staff, non-senior staff, and volunteers) are roughly equal to, in expectation, the work of a team of full-time equivalent people each earning to give $400K a year to GiveWell top charities, with our 95% confidence interval ranging from $220K/yr to $720K/yr. This compares favorably, as $400K donated per year is, I think, higher than what a typically ambitious and skilled EA could be expected to earn to give and is much higher than the earning to give levels found in 80,000 Hours 2014 report."
So it's seems much better than that 200k a year donation figure that you mentioned in expected value.
Regarding value drift:
The kind of people who can donate 200k a year from charity could easily lose sight of their original altruistic ambitions and forget to think critically about their donations over time. Surrounding yourself by money-focused, non-altruistic people can't be good for your long-term resolve to do good. Value drift is a big concern for earning to give.
Also, separately, I think it's really important to be a good person in your personal life. That's just common sense - no matter how much one donates to charity, that doesn't absolve one from personally being an asshole. That's just my opinion though.
Hi there, I’m noticing a spate of pieces recently making similar claims about the efficacy of carbon offsets: yours, Scott Alexander’s the other day and Connor Jennings recent post.
I would suggest folks be *much* more skeptical about cheap carbon offsets. Most of them are basically useless and operate more like religious indulgences. Failure points include additionality, leakage and especially permanence.
Regarding the latter, when I take a flight or use fossil fuel energy in any other way, I am removing carbon that was permanently sequestered underground and introducing it to the atmosphere and ocean. The downfall of most carbon credits and all of the cheap ones is that they merely bind up carbon temporarily in the form of biomass (forest management, tree planting etc) and therefore are not offsetting like with like.
The only worthwhile carbon credits are those that lead to verified permanent sequestration geologically by binding the carbon up with minerals underground or in the ocean. From what I can tell the cost of these methods is still on the order of hundreds of dollars per tCO2.
I think it’s really important to clear the air on this ☺️
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-53645-z
Good to know! Thank you
What about direct carbon capture donations? (Is that what you mean by your last paragraph?) my boyfriend works in electric charging R&D and he says much the same about carbon offsets but donates to direct carbon capture
Yes, you would have to look at their scheme and see that there’s some good evidence that they’re capturing on a net basis what they are claiming and that it’s being sequestered for a 1000+ years. Ideally these programs would be independently audited on something like that basis.
Sorry if this is lazy but do you have any recommendations for any particular DCC I could donate to? Thank you!
I do not but I wonder @Zeke Hausfather if this wouldn’t make for a good topic you to address in a post: the variability of carbon offsets on the market, what to look for in a when choosing one and any specific examples people can look at.
Funnily enough I used to work at Stripe! 😆 Would love to hear recs from zeke
Small world! Hopefully he will take us up on it.
Okay, I think I pretty strongly disagree, but perhaps I am misunderstanding. If the claim is that people should just donate more if you're interested in EA but not really invested enough to feel like you want to dedicate a bunch more time to it, then I agree with that.
I think the idea that people _should_ angle for earning-to-give instead of EA jobs is basically wrong though. I think if you're really interested in EA and competent, you should angle for an EA job. The case for this is basically very simple. Your money often goes to people who distribute it/allocate it/research the most effective ways to donate/do good things with it, and having amazing people in all those roles is also very very important. Money is only as good as what it's spent on, and I think this analysis misses that.
I mean, there's a reason why many organizations say they feel more "talent-constrained" than "funding-constrained" (though of course, many places are basically both talent and funding constrained to some extent). If you have the capacity to earn $1M in Jane Street, but instead spend your time working on how to most effectively distribute malaria nets in Africa, that can be _super high impact_, power-laws rule everything around me. Even within charities, the difference between an okay hire, a good hire, and a great hire are all massive!
And also if you actually want to earn to give, you should try hanging around in SF to roll the dice on early high-performing startups, since upside potential is just so massive there, so it's a much higher EV play (and tax is less for selling stocks afaik).
EDIT: okay actually I googled the stats on this, it was a cached thought I had once at a party, and maybe it's about the same. But does depend on what the downside risk is, since if the downside is "you just earn to give in a regular tech job anyway" then maybe it still makes sense, idk?
Oh I would love to go do that, but H1B legislation and being european makes it harder
The central argument indeed is that most people should earn to give, unless you have good reasons to believe you would be exceptional in something in
I think this is true if the following 3 criteria are met:
1) People are donating a very high amount of money to EA causes (not sure how true this is would have to check the numbers)
2) You have strong reasons to believe you would be very good at a high impact EA researchesque job. (I don't think it follows that most people good at SWE or math fall into this camp, but maybe I don't know what values matter here)
3) if ur research concludes things EAs will follow (this is basically true)
4) A ton of people in EA jobs seem to be in EA jobs because it's emotionally draining for them not to be in a job that directly does good. So probably don't get an EA job if you are not like that.
scrappy comment but hope that clears things up
Okay this probably makes sense, but tbh I think many people who can do okay at jobs in incredibly demanding industries (e.g. HRT, Jane street) can probably also be super agentic and effective employees of high-impact charities - but I would change my mind if I were wrong about this and they are actually easily replaceable.
I think this falls into a bit of a failure mode at extremes. A large proportion of eggs in shops are now not from battery chickens, because there is consumer demand. Similarly, most nice chocolate is fairtrade because of consumer demand. It's less efficient to buy fairtrade or free range than just to donate the difference to a very effective charity, but if lots of people buy fairtrade, it has an effect on industry incentives. If a lot of people go vegan, this encourages companies to invest in meat alternatives, and to green wash themselves in ways that may have some benefits. Plus, if consumers showed they were happy to live with slight reductions in quality of consumption in order to help the planet, this would perhaps let politicians know that suggesting this wouldn't be career suicide. I think if you buy anything with an "ethical" label, you agree with this already to some extent - the premium for ethical could always be given to a more efficient cause, but you'd lose something if everyone did.
Yes, even if one entirely agrees with the arguments in the post, those are only good for maximizing individual impact. But as a general rule to promote to a larger community, it seems sub-optimal to me. It would be perpetuating the status quo. Although I do think that if the money is donated not just to effective charities with direct impact but also to orgs and people who have a shot at achieving systemic change, thus reducing the reliance of certain high impact interventions on private funding, I would be more easily on board.
hi celeste! I think this is all true!
EA was very earning-to-give focused in the early days and shifted more towards direct work over time because a lot of smart EAs thought hard about this and did the math. Income taxes, payroll taxes, health insurance, transaction costs... that adds up.
Two more factors I personally think matter:
(1) some people are going to be more motivated and work harder doing direct work vs. working in finance. For some it's the opposite. Stereotype meme example: a turbo-autist will probably do more good working in tech and donating so NTs can do lobbying work. But it's good to have NTs in EA too.
(2) With direct work you see the bottlenecks directly because you are working on them everyday. That may help allocate effort better than donating. But EA orgs seem pretty competent and aligned so low-confidence on this one.
I do think Scott's genius-saint-everyone-else trichotomy is too simplified. A lot of what looks like genius is deep domain expertise from persistence and hard work over decades.
The atmosphere in US EA in the 2010s was closer to what you believe in. E-to-G and in particular one's donation amount carried higher social status. I think there were also non-math reasons why things changed in the 2020s: selection effects for who got into EA due to status signaling cascades, and FTX. Global politics looked different, and people, including me, had more confidence in the long-term positive externalities of rowing1 for global capitalism.
1. https://www.cold-takes.com/rowing-steering-anchoring-equity-mutiny/
Personally, in 2025, I think the best long-term options for animal welfare are:
a. working in AI and advocating internally at your company to make the AI care more about animals (very low confidence on tractability). Or just rowing for Anthropic.
b. direct work on cellular agriculture
but earning to give is probably underrated for people who have comparative advantage in a high-earning technical field, and don't get lonely in a standard corporate atmosphere.
yes yes yes! agree fully
Good to hear EA lore. It kinda makes sense since my intro to EA was mostly with emphasis on donations (early singer stuff)
I don't know if you would like it but do you know the book Strangers Drowning? It's one of my favorite books ever and there is early EA lore/vibes in there that you don't get in the usual internal community channels.
It's a bit strange because it's a New Yorker journalist writing the profiles so the overall frame is influenced by common-sense morality and like NT-writer emotions. But you can always skip the non-EA chapters.
It's on my very long TBR. I am very interested in it but feel that it wouldn't teach me much new and I would already agree with it, but should probably check it out regardless.
Common sense morality?? Gross
I agree with the core point that money is a powerful lever and that earning to give is underrated. If you can earn a lot without burning out or hollowing yourself out, donating is obviously one of the most effective ways to reduce suffering.
Where I disagree is the implied conclusion that this should be the dominant life strategy, or that ethics collapses into a single-objective optimization problem.
Taken seriously, this framing leaves very little room to actually live. Enjoyment, exploration, curiosity, and following idiosyncratic interests become morally suspicious unless they cash out in donations later. That's not just demanding, it's a very thin model of human flourishing.
It also assumes people are mostly interchangeable units of output: "pick something, get good, get paid." But novelty doesn't come from optimization strategies. Rather it comes from people following weird, non-obvious interests before anyone knows they matter.
Geniuses aren't born, but they also aren't produced by telling everyone to maximize salary first and meaning later. A framework that discourages exploration selects against exactly the kinds of trajectories that later have outsized impact.
I'm also uneasy with the idea that you can cleanly outsource ethics to donation while treating the rest of life as morally neutral. What you spend 40/50 hours a week doing shapes your values, attention, and the futures you imagine. Money can correct outcomes, but it doesn't cancel formative effects.
So my gripe isn't with donating or caring about consequences. It's with turning utilitarianism into a totalizing worldview that crowds out other legitimate ways of contributing, creating, exploring, building strange things, or simply living a life that isn't constantly justified by a spreadsheet.
Earning to give is one powerful tool. Treating it as the answer is where I think this becomes lazy.
fair critique. The piece is deliberately a bit reductive.
I think the point kind of stands. In practice everyone needs to find a balance between doing most good and being like human and normal.
Maybe I will do a follow up piece that summarizes what I mean better, can't get it out right now
Sure, if you're reducing it for engagement and shareability, that makes sense. In that sense, it's a utilitarian act. I don't actually think your point doesn't stand, by the way.
My issue is more that taking this viewpoint to its absolute implications leads to some pretty absurd outcomes, which end up undermining the logical case for utilitarianism itself.
Please do write a follow-up piece, though.
Thanks for linking the ACX post.
I just donated to an effective charity and will donate more next year (in a week lol)
It plan to repledge (trialed before) as a result of this post
oh how lovely
This reasoning applies well to problems that are solvable with current technology and don’t require technical breakthroughs.
Inoculating thousands of children against malaria only requires buying vaccines from pharma companies and recruiting people to inject them - a task anyone can easily learn, and that a lot of people in developing countries will execute for a much cheaper salary than you.
In that case, yes, unless you’ve got a totally new vision of how to organize a team of vaccine-providers for multiplied efficiency or you know how to produce a vaccine multiple times cheaper, your best way to have impact is probably to just donate.
But if you care about technical problems, the reasoning changes.
It’s never obvious in retrospect whether technical solutions scale better with money or with people.
My guess is that you have some classes of problems where, for a given number of players, having more teams to explore different directions of the solutions space is strictly superior to having more capital allocated in between the players.
Another solution, that I often saw in entrepreneurship circles, is to earn not to give but to fund your self-exploration and/or your own bets.
In risky fields, with highly uncertain returns but very high upsides, the number of parallel bets can matter a lot - but most institutional investors will reduce risk, bet on consensual innovation, with short-term returns.
This is where the hybrid strategy of earning to invest can really shine.
This article is silly. It's like saying "hey, if you accept that ethics is entirely about impact then the stuff EAs do is the best at impact"
But most critics of EA deny that impact is the only thing you should care about to begin with. So this article doesn't address the fundamental claim of the non-EAs.
Me feeling better now for not having an EA job but having already signed the GWWC pledge :)
But I think donating money is also trying to be a “good person,” especially if you try to donate all your money above a certain threshold, rather than donate a percentage of your total money like most EAs do.
Strongly disagree that people shouldn’t apply to “direct work” roles and just focus on earning to give (if that’s your thesis)
As an example, I'm confident that there are software developers who would have been significantly more impactful than me at my role at GWWC, but didn't apply, and the extra ~$/year that they are donating (if they are actually donating more in practice than what they would have) does not compensate for that.
I also think that there's a good chance that I would have done other vaguely impactful work, or donated more myself, if they had been hired instead of me, largely compensating for their missed donations.
I think EAs overestimate the effects of replaceability in direct work roles, and it can cause jobs at highly impactful organizations to filled by mediocre candidates (like me) when having more and better people doing direct work would be much more impactful.
>The real most environmentally conscious person is probably someone working for Hudson River Trading who donates 500k a year to climate offsets.
Ok chat, does this person exist?
No they just like to pretend they do to justify bullshit high paying jobs because this way people « can do good » while not actually doing anything worthwhile.
It’s basically like Apple pretending to care for the planet because they remove the charger from their phone while still renewing the thing every year to promote sales.
It’s profoundly dishonest argument/behavior and it’s actually disgusting they try to pretend they can be one of the good ones this way.
No these people actually do exist, I've met them
You’ve met someone from HRT that donates 500k/year to climate offsets?
I've met people close enough. Generally not climate offsets, but animal welfare
You've met *people* (ie >1) from HRT who donate close to 500k/year to animal welfare?
Of course not. Even if that was half true they could basically say whatever they want and you couldn’t prove that they aren’t doing what they pretend.
I guess she is just too young to understand bullshit propaganda.
Some idiots believed in communism at some point too, so…
I used to think this. Worked for a quant firm. Discovered white collar crime and quit. Now strongly anti-recommend. Being in an environment like that will gradually normalise things that affect your psyche in ways most people don't have the self awareness to understand. People are complicated and being a conventionally good person (virtue ethics, even if it's dumb sounding) has a lot of knock on positive effects you mightn't expect.
I think a lot of people are pretty skeptical about carbon offsets--are they really going to make the transition from fossil fuels to renewables, or are they just going to swell some carbon-offset company's bottom line? It looks too easy and at some point you have to actually do the technically and logistically complicated work of increasing renewable capacity, which is much harder in the current political climate.
Also, people have evolved mental circuitry for detecting people trying to look good while doing bad, as it is a VERY old problem--your great-great-[100x]-great-granddad had to worry about someone claiming they did all the work hunting the mammoth while they were actually sitting at camp. I think 'earn to give' and carbon offsets both set off those alarms even if they kind of make sense. Someone who decides to pursue a career that makes $500K a year and then donates half of it to charity is still pulling in $250K after all is said and done, and even if $150K goes to taxes...well, you're still making $100K a year, which isn't too bad, *and* if things get rough you can always drop your charity. Compare that with someone who goes to make $60K as a teacher and can't easily make more money if they need it (precarity is a big problem in the middle and lower classes).
Also it's irrational but you shouldn't discount the effects of high-profile cases like SBF, who was a big proponent of it.
Also most people spend most of their day doing their job, so for an idealistic person having to spend 50-60 hours a week helping rich people get richer is very unpleasant. They'd rather spend that in a job that they feel has meaning even if on some theoretical optimization level they should make as much as possible and convert it into a good cause.
The ‘problem’ with this line of thinking (consequentialism) is that ultimately it boils down to - the best person is one who earns most money. Because earning itself creates the most value
Stupid argument. Doing good isn’t something you can remove from morals, which are not universal and have definitions that are very localized.
It’s pretending as if helping save random animals is as important as not enslaving your fellow humans that will have to work their ass off to pay for the bullshit finance job.
That’s just extremely dumb.
I can assure you that if you are an asshole making hundred of thousands off the back of honest workers, no amount of giving to whatever bullshit cause, « managed » by a no less bullshit org (that is very likely to be corrupt) is going to move the scale meaningfully.
If you want to do good, become a doctor and consult for free or something.
You should stop peddling bullshit to rationalize predatory behavior.
none of these are actual arguments.
The against malaria foundation is ran by very dedicated people and gets audited regularely
And no, saving animals is not as important as "not enslaving your fellow human" but there is a point where saving animals becomes so cheap <--> helping human very expensive (incl second order) that you should probably consider the animal instead
Why do you think being a doctor consulting for free has less impact than a doctor charging out the ass in a rich ass neighbourhood and then gettin thousands of kids vitamin A so they don't go blind!?
read peter singer <3
Starting a company is so much higher expected value. Go through charity entrepreneurship if you're good enough to work at Jane Street. Make the next lead elimination project. Start a political consulting company. Start a think tank. Think critically about counterfactuals and how you can steer big systems. Far more effective.
Yes, I really should have included this.
Founding to give is likely higher EV. I just don't know enough about it. (concerns about value drift pop up though)
https://www.ambitiousimpact.com/post/what-is-the-expected-value-of-creating-a-givewell-top-charity
From the conclusion section of this article, written from the perspective of someone who would be a typical person admitted to the aim (charity entrepreneurship) program and had just started a small charity (most people who get in do succeed in doing this):
"When I try to model all these factors out in the following Guesstimate model, I get an estimate that the total efforts of our team (including senior staff, non-senior staff, and volunteers) are roughly equal to, in expectation, the work of a team of full-time equivalent people each earning to give $400K a year to GiveWell top charities, with our 95% confidence interval ranging from $220K/yr to $720K/yr. This compares favorably, as $400K donated per year is, I think, higher than what a typically ambitious and skilled EA could be expected to earn to give and is much higher than the earning to give levels found in 80,000 Hours 2014 report."
So it's seems much better than that 200k a year donation figure that you mentioned in expected value.
Regarding value drift:
The kind of people who can donate 200k a year from charity could easily lose sight of their original altruistic ambitions and forget to think critically about their donations over time. Surrounding yourself by money-focused, non-altruistic people can't be good for your long-term resolve to do good. Value drift is a big concern for earning to give.
Also, separately, I think it's really important to be a good person in your personal life. That's just common sense - no matter how much one donates to charity, that doesn't absolve one from personally being an asshole. That's just my opinion though.
Wow crazy numbers here, thank you, might make a follow-up post