And whenever this got brought up at meetings, people giggled, probably because they were thinking of good examples. I can’t deny there’s a lot of anecdotal evidence here (hi Ozy!). But when I look into it, it seems totally false.

My source was the 2014 Less Wrong survey data, which asked respondents whether they self-identified as effective altruists and whether they participated in effective altruist groups and meetups. Using that question, I separated the respondents into 758 non-effective-altruists and 422 effective altruists. The survey had also asked people whether they had been diagnosed with various mental illnesses, so I checked the rates in both groups. Including self-diagnosis there were no particular results; when I limited it to professionally diagnosed illnesses things got a little more interesting.

Effective altruists had about the same levels of anxiety disorders and obsessive-compulsive disorder as non-EA Less Wrongers. However, they had slightly higher levels of depression (22% vs. 17%) which was barely significant (p = 0.04) due to a large sample size. They also had more autism (8.5% vs. 5%) which was also significant (p = 0.02).

I expected this to be mediated by a tendency for autistic people to be more consequentialist and consequentalists to be more EA, and both these things were true to some degree, but even when I limited the analysis to all consequentialists, effective altruists still had more autism. Further, autistic people seemed to donate a higher percent of their income to charity than neurotypical people or people with other mental illnesses even separated from effective altruist status – that is, even among people none of whom were effective altruists, the autistic people seemed to donate more (effect not always significant) even though they generally had lower incomes.

I conclude that effective altruists are not unusually self-hating or scrupulous, but that they may be a little more autistic, and the reason why isn’t the obvious one.

A caveat, by way of presenting another interesting result. Rusch (2015) (h/t @bechhof) studied whether bankers were more consequentialist (in this case, more likely to give consequentialist answers to the Trolley Problem and Fat Man Problem) than nonbankers. He found that they were. But then he checked for confounders and found the result was entirely an artifact of men being more consequentialist than women and bankers being predominantly male.

This is pretty astounding – men are almost six times as consequentialist as women!

On the other hand, in both my Less Wrong data in general and the effective altruist subgroup, men and women don’t vary much in consequentialismishness. Either Rusch’s data is wrong, or there’s a strong filter that acts to get only consequentialists into Less Wrong regardless of gender, or LW converts women to consequentialism (without further converting men).

Interestingly, effective altruists were much more consequentialist than non-effective-altruist LWers – 80% versus 50%. They also had more women than the non-effective-altruists. So it looks like LW filters for consequentalists so strongly it gets an even balance of consequentialist men and consequentialist women, and past that stage, filtering further for consequentialism doesn’t change gender balance much.

This points out a limitation of my statistics above. All it shows is that effective altruists don’t differ from other rationalists in levels of mental illness. It’s possible and indeed likely that both effective altruists and rationalists differ from the general population in all kinds of ways. It’s even possible that self-hate and scrupulosity drive people into the rationality movement in general, although I can’t imagine why that would be. It’s just that they don’t seem to have any extra power to make people effective altruists once they’re there.

The consistently one attempts to adhere to an ideology, the more one's sanity becomes a series of unprincipled exceptions.

— graaaaaagh (@graaaaaagh) February 5, 2015

Meeting with a large group of effective altruists can be a philosophically disconcerting experience, and my recent meetup with Stanford Effective Altruist Club was no exception.

Buck forced me to pay attention to an argument I’ve been carefully avoiding. Most people intuitively believe that animals have non-zero moral value; it’s worse to torture a dog than to not do that. Most people also believe their moral value is some function of the animal’s complexity and intelligence which leaves them less morally important than humans but not infinitely less morally important than humans. Most people then conclude that probably the welfare of animals is moderately important in the same way the welfare of various other demographic groups like elderly people or Norwegians is moderately important – one more thing to plug into the moral calculus.

In reality it’s pretty hard to come up with way of valuing animals that makes this work. If it takes a thousand chickens to have the moral weight of one human, the importance of chicken suffering alone is probably within an order of magnitude of all human suffering. You would need to set your weights remarkably precisely for the values of global animal suffering and global human suffering to even be in the same ballpark. Barring that amazing coincidence, either you shouldn’t care about animals at all or they should totally swamp every other concern. Most of what would seem like otherwise reasonable premises suggest the “totally swamp every other concern” branch.

So if you’re actually an effective altruist, the sort of person who wants your do-gooding to do the most good per unit resource, you should be focusing entirely on animal-related charities and totally ignoring humans (except insofar as humans actions affect animals; worrying about x-risk is probably still okay).

I acknowledged the argument was very convincing, but told Buck that I waS basically going to safe-word out of that level of utilitarian reasoning, for the sake of my sanity.

Buck pointed out that this shouldn’t be too scary, given that many utilitarians have already had to go through a similar process. Peter Singer talks about widening circles of concern. First you move from total selfishness to an understanding that your friends and family are people just like you and need to be treated with respect and understanding. Then you go from just your friends and family to everyone in your community. Then you go from just your community to all humanity. Then you go from just humanity to all animals.

By the time most people figure out what they’re doing they already accept at least friends, family, and community. But going from “just my community” to “also foreigners” is a difficult step that’s kind of at the heart of the effective altruism movement. In the same way that allowing animals into the circle of concern totally pushes out the value of all humans, allowing starving Third World people into the circle of concern totally pushes out most First World charities like art museums and school music programs and holiday food drives. This is a scary discovery and most people shy away from it. Effective altruists are the people who are selected for not having shied away from it. So why shy away from doing the same with animals?

It’s a good question. After thinking about it for a while, I think my answer is that I never actually completed the process of widening my circles of concern and neither has anybody else, and because I’m thinking about this one in an abstract intellectual way I’m imagining actually completing it, which would be much scarier than the incomplete things I’ve done before.

Like, although I acknowledge my friends and family as important people whom I should try to help, in reality I don’t treat them as quite as important as myself. If my brother asked me for money, I’d lend it to him, but I wouldn’t give him exactly half my money no-strings-attached on the grounds that he is exactly as important to me as I am.

Likewise, although I acknowledge strangers as important people whom I should try to help, in reality I don’t treat them as quite as important as my friends. We all raised a lot of money to help Multi when she was in a bad situation, but there are thousands of other people in the same exact same bad situation and we’re not putting nearly as much effort into them.

You can try to justify this in terms of “well, I know myself better than I know my brother, and I know Multi better than I know strangers, so I’m more effective at helping me and Multi, so I’m just rationally doing the things that would have the most impact”. But I think if I bothered to dream up some thought experiment where that wasn’t true, I would prefer to help me and Multi to my brother and random strangers even after that factor had been controlled away.

This doesn’t come as a surprise to me and I’m not sorry. But…well…I guess my worry about the animal charity thing wasn’t that I was inconsistent, so much as that I was being meta-inconsistent; that is, I didn’t even have a consistent set of rules for deciding whether I was going to want to be consistent or not.

And now I think I might have a consistent policy of allowing some of my resources into each new circle of concern while also holding back the rest of it for the sake of my sanity. Thus my endorsement of GiveWell’s principle that you should donate at least 10% of your income to charity, but then feel okay about not donating more if you don’t want to. I am allowed to balance resources devoted to sanity versus morality and decide how much of what I have I want to send into each new circle of concern – without denying that the circle exists.

I think that armed with this idea I am willing to accept Buck’s argument about animal welfare being more important than human welfare, insofar as this means I should donate some resources to animal welfare without necessarily having to give up caring about human welfare completely. I don’t think I can make a principled defense of doing this. But I think I can claim I’m being unprincipled in a meta-consistent and effectively sanity-protecting way.

Here is a response I got on Facebook to yesterday’s essay. I will admit I do not, exactly, know what to do. But I do have a call to action I’ve been meaning to make for a while that might tie in more than a little with recent discussions.

But first we’re going to have to go back to two of the examples of Tumblr meme-spreading I mentioned yesterday:

“This is going to be an unpopular opinion but I see stuff about ppl not wanting to reblog ferguson things and awareness around the world because they do not want negativity in their life plus it will cause them to have anxiety. They come to tumblr to escape n feel happy which think is a load of bull. There r literally ppl dying who live with the fear of going outside their homes to be shot and u cant post a fucking picture because it makes u a little upset?”

“Can yall maybe take some time away from reblogging fandom or humor crap and read up and reblog pakistan because the privilege you have of a safe bubble is not one shared by others?”

Wipe away the spittle and there’s an important point here worth steelmanning. Something like “Yes, the feeling of constantly being outraged and mired in the latest controversy is unpleasant. And yes, it would be nice to get to avoid it and spend time with your family and look at kitten pics or something. But when the controversy is about people being murdered in cold blood, or living in fear, or something like that – then it’s your duty as a decent human being to care. In the best case scenario you’ll discharge that duty by organizing widespread protests or something – but the absolute least you can do is reblog a couple of slogans.”

I think Cliff Pervocracy is trying to say something similar in this post. Key excerpt:

When you’ve grown up with messages that you’re incompetent to make your own decisions, that you don’t deserve any of the things you have, and that you’ll never be good enough, the [conservative] fantasy of rugged individualism starts looking pretty damn good.

Intellectually, I think my current political milieu of feminism/progressivism/social justice is more correct, far better for the world in general, and more helpful to me since I don’t actually live in a perfectly isolated cabin.

But god, it’s uncomfortable. It’s intentionally uncomfortable—it’s all about getting angry at injustice and questioning the rightness of your own actions and being sad so many people still live such painful lives. Instead of looking at your cabin and declaring “I shall name it…CLIFFORDSON MANOR,” you need to look at your cabin and recognize that a long series of brutal injustices are responsible for the fact that you have a white-collar job that lets you buy a big useless house in the woods while the original owners of the land have been murdered or forced off it.

And you’re never good enough. You can be good—certainly you get major points for charity and activism and fighting the good fight—but not good enough. No matter what you do, you’re still participating in plenty of corrupt systems that enforce oppression. Short of bringing about a total revolution of everything, your work will never be done, you’ll never be good enough.

Once again, to be clear, I don’t think this is wrong. I just think it’s a bummer.

I don’t know of a solution to this. (Bummer again.) I don’t think progressivism can ever compete with the cozy self-satisfaction of the cabin fantasy. I don’t think it should. Change is necessary in the world, people don’t change if they’re totally happy and comfortable, therefore discomfort is necessary.

I would like to make what I hope is a friendly amendment to Cliff’s post. He thinks he’s talking about progressivism versus conservativism, but he isn’t. A conservative happy with his little cabin and occasional hunting excursions, and a progressive happy with her little SoHo flat and occasional poetry slams are psychologically pretty similar. So are a liberal who abandons a cushy life to work as a community organizer in the inner city and fight poverty, and a conservative who abandons a cushy life to serve as an infantryman in Afghanistan to fight terrorism. The distinction Cliff is trying to get at here isn’t left-right. It’s activist versus passivist.

As part of a movement recently deemed postpolitical, I have to admit I fall more on the passivist side of the spectrum – at least this particular conception of it. I talk about politics when they interest me or when I enjoy doing so, and I feel an obligation not to actively make things worse. But I don’t feel like I need to talk nonstop about whatever the designated Issue is until it distresses me and my readers both.

Possibly I just wasn’t designed for politics. I’m actively repulsed by most protests, regardless of cause or alignment, simply because the idea of thousands of enraged people joining together to scream at something – without even considering whether the other side has a point – terrifies and disgusts me. Even hashtag campaigns and other social media protest-substitutes evoke the same feeling of panic. Maybe I was the victim of mob violence in a past life or something, I don’t know.

Other people I know are too sensitive to be political – hearing about all the evils of the world makes them want to curl into a ball and cry for hours. Still others feel deep personal guilt about anything they hear – an almost psychotic belief that if people are being hurt anywhere in the world, it’s their fault for not preventing it. A few are chronically uncertain about which side to take and worried that anything they do will cause more harm than good. A couple have traumatic experiences that make them leery of affiliating with a particular side – did you know the prosecutor in the Ferguson case was the son of a police officer who was killed by a black suspect? And still others are perfectly innocent and just want to reblog kitten pictures.

Pervocracy admits this, and puts it better than I do:

But god, it’s uncomfortable. It’s intentionally uncomfortable—it’s all about getting angry at injustice and questioning the rightness of your own actions and being sad so many people still live such painful lives. Instead of looking at your cabin and declaring “I shall name it…CLIFFORDSON MANOR,” you need to look at your cabin and recognize that a long series of brutal injustices are responsible for the fact that you have a white-collar job that lets you buy a big useless house in the woods while the original owners of the land have been murdered or forced off it. And you’re never good enough. You can be good—certainly you get major points for charity and activism and fighting the good fight—but not good enough. No matter what you do, you’re still participating in plenty of corrupt systems that enforce oppression. Short of bringing about a total revolution of everything, your work will never be done, you’ll never be good enough.

That seems about right. Pervocracy ends up with discomfort, and I’m in about the same place. But other, less stable people end up with self-loathing. Still other people go further than that, into Calvinist-style “perhaps I am a despicable worm unworthy of existence”. moteinthedark’s reply to Pervocracy gives me the impression that she struggles with this sometime. For these people, abstaining from politics is the only coping tool they have.

But the counterargument is still that you’ve got a lot of chutzpah playing that card when people in Peshawar or Ferguson or Iraq don’t have access to this coping tool. You can’t just bring in a doctor’s note and say “As per my psychiatrist, I have a mental health issue and am excused from experiencing concern for the less fortunate.”

One option is to deny the obligation. I am super sympathetic to this one. The marginal cost of my existence on the poor and suffering of the world is zero. In fact, it’s probably positive. My economic activity consists mostly of treating patients, buying products, and paying taxes. The first treats the poor’s illnesses, the second creates jobs, and the third pays for government assistance programs. Exactly what am I supposed to be apologizing for here? I may benefit from the genocide of the Indians in that I live on land that was formerly Indian-occupied. But I also benefit from the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, in that I live on land that was formerly dinosaur-occupied. I don’t feel like I’m complicit in the asteroid strike; why should I feel complicit in the genocide?

I have no objection to people who say this. The problem with it isn’t philosophical, it’s emotional. For most people it won’t be enough. The old saying goes “you can’t reason yourself out of something you didn’t reason yourself into to begin with”, and the idea that secure and prosperous people need to “give something back” is a lot older than accusations of “being complicit in structures of oppression”. It’s probably older than the Bible. People feel a deep-seated need to show that they understand how lucky they are and help those less fortunate than themselves.

So what do we do with the argument that we are morally obligated to be political activists, possibly by reblogging everything about Ferguson that crosses our news feed?

II.

We ask: why the heck are we privileging that particular subsection of the category “improving the world”?

Pervocracy says that “short of bringing about a total revolution of everything, your work will never be done, you’ll never be good enough.” But he is overly optimistic. Has your total revolution of everything eliminated ischaemic heart disease? Cured malaria? Kept elderly people out of nursing homes? No? Then you haven’t discharged your infinite debt yet!

Being a perfect person doesn’t just mean participating in every hashtag campaign you hear about. It means spending all your time at soup kitchens, becoming vegan, donating everything you have to charity, calling your grandmother up every week, and marrying Third World refugees who need visas rather than your one true love.

And not all of these things are equally important.

Five million people participated in the #BlackLivesMatter Twitter campaign. Suppose that solely as a result of this campaign, no currently-serving police officer ever harms an unarmed black person ever again. That’s 100 lives saved per year times let’s say twenty years left in the average officer’s career, for a total of 2000 lives saved, or 1/2500th of a life saved per campaign participant. By coincidence, 1/2500th of a life saved happens to be what you get when you donate $1 to the Against Malaria Foundation. The round-trip bus fare people used to make it to their #BlackLivesMatter protests could have saved ten times as many black lives as the protests themselves, even given completely ridiculous overestimates of the protests’ efficacy.

The moral of the story is that if you feel an obligation to give back to the world, participating in activist politics is one of the worst possible ways to do it. Giving even a tiny amount of money to charity is hundreds or even thousands of times more effective than almost any political action you can take. Even if you’re absolutely convinced a certain political issue is the most important thing in the world, you’ll effect more change by donating money to nonprofits lobbying about it than you will be reblogging anything.

There is no reason that politics would even come to the attention of an unbiased person trying to “break out of their bubble of privilege” or “help people who are afraid of going outside of their house”. Anybody saying that people who want to do good need to spread their political cause is about as credible as a televangelist saying that people who want to do good need to give them money to buy a new headquarters. It’s possible that televangelists having beautiful headquarters might be slightly better than them having hideous headquarters, but it’s not the first thing a reasonable person trying to improve the world would think of.

Nobody cares about charity. Everybody cares about politics, especially race and gender. Just as televangelists who are obsessed with moving to a sweeter pad may come to think that donating to their building fund is the one true test of a decent human being, so our universal obsession with politics, race, and gender incites people to make convincing arguments that taking and spreading the right position on those issues is the one true test of a decent human being.

So now we have an angle of attack against our original question. “Am I a bad person for not caring more about politics?” Well, every other way of doing good, especially charity, is more important than politics. So this question is strictly superseded by “Am I a bad person for not engaging in every other way of doing good, especially charity?” And then once we answer that, we can ask “Also, however much sin I have for not engaging in charity, should we add another mass of sin, about 1% as large, for my additional failure to engage in politics?”

And Cliff Pervocracy’s concern of “Even if I do a lot of politics, amn’t I still a bad person for not doing all the politics?” is superseded by “Even if I give a lot of charity, am I a bad person for not doing all the charity? And then a bad person in an additional way, about 1% as large, for not doing all the politics as well?”

There’s no good answer to this question. If you want to feel anxiety and self-loathing for not giving 100% of your income, minus living expenses, to charity, then no one can stop you.

I, on the other hand, would prefer to call that “not being perfect”. I would prefer to say that if you feel like you will live in anxiety and self-loathing until you have given a certain amount of money to charity, you should make that certain amount ten percent.

Why ten percent?

It’s ten percent because that is the standard decreed by Giving What We Can and the effective altruist community. Why should we believe their standard? I think we should believe it because if we reject it in favor of “No, you are a bad person unless you give all of it,” then everyone will just sit around feeling very guilty and doing nothing. But if we very clearly say “You have discharged your moral duty if you give ten percent or more,” then many people will give ten percent or more. The most important thing is having a Schelling point, and ten percent is nice, round, divinely ordained, and – crucially – the Schelling point upon which we have already settled. It is an active Schelling point. If you give ten percent, you can have your name on a nice list and get access to a secret forum on the Giving What We Can site which is actually pretty boring.

It’s ten percent because definitions were made for Man, not Man for definitions, and if we define “good person” in a way such that everyone is sitting around miserable because they can’t reach an unobtainable standard, we are stupid definition-makers. If we are smart definition-makers, we will define it in precisely that way which makes it the most effective tool to convince people to give at least that much.

Finally, it’s ten percent because if you believe in something like universalizability as a foundation for morality, a world in which everybody gives ten percent of their income to charity is a world where about seven trillion dollars go to charity a year. Solving global poverty forever is estimated to cost about $100 billion a year for the couple-decade length of the project. That’s about two percent of the money that would suddenly become available. If charity got seven trillion dollars a year, the first year would give us enough to solve global poverty, eliminate all treatable diseases, fund research into the untreatable ones for approximately the next forever, educate anybody who needs educating, feed anybody who needs feeding, fund an unparalleled renaissance in the arts, permamently save every rainforest in the world, and have enough left over to launch five or six different manned missions to Mars. That would be the first year. Goodness only knows what would happen in Year 2.

(by contrast, if everybody in the world retweeted the latest hashtag campaign, Twitter would break.)

Everyone giving this level of charity would kill Moloch dead. Moloch is the spirit of things responding to perverse incentives. But charity is in some sense the perfect unincentivized action. If you think the most important thing to do is to cure malaria, then a charitable donation is deliberately throwing the power of your brain and muscle behind the cause of curing malaria. If, as I’ve postulated, the reason we can’t solve world poverty and disease and so on is Moloch, the capture of our financial resources by the undirected dance of incentives, then what better way to fight back than by saying “Thanks but no thanks, I’m taking this abstract representation of my resources and using it exactly how I think it should most be used”?

If you give 10% per year, you have absolutely done your part in making that world a reality. You can honestly say “Well, it’s not my fault that everyone else is still dragging their feet.”

III.

Once the level is fixed at ten percent, we get a better idea how to answer the original question: “If I want to be a good person who gives back to the community, but I am triggered by politics, what do I do?” You do good in a way that doesn’t trigger you. Another good thing about having less than 100% obligation is that it gives you the opportunity to budget and trade-off. If you make $30,000 and you accept 10% as a good standard you want to live up to, you can either donate $3000 to charity, or participate in several thousand political protests until your number of lives or dollars or DALYs saved is equivalent to that. I hope you have a lot of free time.

Nobody is perfect. This gives us license not to be perfect either. Instead of aiming for an impossible goal, falling short, and not doing anything at all, we set an arbitrary but achievable goal designed to encourage the most people to do as much as possible. That goal is ten percent.

Everything is commensurable. This gives us license to determine exactly how we fulfill that ten percent goal. Some people are triggered and terrified by politics. Other people are too sick to volunteer. Still others are poor and cannot give very much money. But money is a constant reminder that everything goes into the same pot, and that you can fulfill obligations in multiple equivalent ways. Some people will not be able to give ten percent of their income without excessive misery, but I bet thinking about their contribution in terms of a fungible good will help them decide how much volunteering or activism they need to reach the equivalent.

Cliff Pervocracy says “Your work will never be done, you’ll never be good enough.” This seems like a recipe for – at best – undirected misery, stewing in self-loathing, and total defenselessness against the first toxoplasma parasite to come along and tell them they need to engage in the latest conflict or else they’re trash. At worst, it autocatalyzes an opposition of egoists who laugh at the idea of helping others.

On the other hand, Jesus says “Take my yoke upon you…and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” This seems like a recipe for getting people to say “Okay, I’ll take your yoke upon me! Thanks for the offer!”

Persian poet Omar Khayyam, considering the conflict between the strict laws of Islam and his own desire to enjoy life, settles upon the following rule:

Heed not the Sunna, nor the law divine;
If to the poor their portion you assign,
And never injure one, nor yet abuse,
I guarantee you heaven, as well as wine!

I’m not saying that donating 10% of your money to charity makes you a great person who is therefore freed of every other moral obligation. I’m not saying that anyone who chooses not to do it is therefore a bad person. I’m just saying that if you feel a need to discharge some feeling of a moral demand upon you to help others, and you want to do it intelligently, it beats most of the alternatives.

This month is the membership drive for Giving What We Can, the organization of people who have promised to give 10% of their earnings to charity. I am a member. Ozy is an aspiring member who plans to join once they are making a salary. Many of the commenters here are members – I recognize for example Taymon Beal’s name on their list. Some well-known moral philosophers like Peter Singer and Derek Parfit are members. Seven hundred other people are also members.

I wish I had a Bitcoin address handy to solve all the world’s problems, but until I do I would recommend giving them a look.

Ozy:

A man goes up to a stockbroker and says, “You guys are so stupid. You invest in more than one stock. But there’s only one stock that is going to pay off the most. Why don’t you just put all your money in the stock that is going to earn the most money, instead of putting it in a bunch of stocks?”

With my usual quick and timely response, I would like to point out the fallacy within this article on effective altruism. The author offers up several things that would, in an effective altruist world, not exist:

If we all followed such a ridiculous approach, what would happen to:

1. Domestic efforts to serve those in need?
2. Advanced research funding for many diseases?
3. Research on and efforts in creative and innovative new approaches to helping others that no one has ever tried before?
4. More local and smaller charitable endeavors?
5. Funding for the arts, and important cultural endeavors such as the preservation of historically important structures and archives?

6. Volunteerism for the general public, since most “worthy” efforts are overseas and require a professional degree to have what Friedman calls “deep expertise in niche areas”?
7. Careers in the nonprofit sector?”

The answer to several of those is pretty obvious: people should work in the nonprofit sector if that’s their comparative advantage, who gives a @#$! about volunteerism or local charitable endeavors, arts funding comes out of people’s entertainment budgets they way it should, and resources are scarce and each donation to someone relatively well-off in the developed world trades off against resources from someone less well off. So far, so well-trammeled.

However, I think his points two and three are actually really interesting points. A lot of people seem to think of effective altruism as like the man who wants to invest in the best possible stock. However, in reality, just as a person who wants to maximize their returns invests in more than one stock, a society where everyone is an effective altruist would probably have a variety of different charities (although perhaps a narrower segment of charities), just as they do now.

To be clear, there are certain charities that are not effective at all and would probably not exist in a hypothetical effective altruist society. Make a Wish Foundation would probably not survive the conversion to a hypothetical effective altruist society (except, presumably, out of one’s entertainment budget). Nevertheless, the nonexistence of obviously ineffective charities doesn’t mean that we as a society would decide to have fewer charities, any more than not buying lottery tickets means that you are only allowed to invest in one stock.

(Note that I am using stocks as an analogy. Stocks and charity donations are unlike each other in a lot of ways. It isn’t a perfect metaphor. Also, I literally know nothing about stock investing.)

One of the reasons that people invest in more than one stock is uncertainty. Probably some stocks will go up and some stocks will go down. However, I, as an investor, don’t know which stocks will pay off more than other stocks. Therefore, I want to hedge my bets. Knowing that the market will go up in general, I choose to invest in a variety of different stocks, so that no matter what happens I keep some of my money.

A similar uncertainty applies to charities. For instance, it’s possible that Give Directly is run by crooks who steal all the donations. (As far as I know, Give Directly is an excellent organization and never steals anyone’s money.) If everyone has given to Give Directly, we’re screwed. If we have several different charities giving cash to people in the developing world, then it matters less that one of them is run by crooks. Similarly, we may be uncertain about whether malaria relief or schistosomiasis relief is the best bang for one’s charity buck. Given that it is impossible to eliminate all uncertainty, it’s best to direct some money towards both, so that in case malaria relief turns out to be a bust we haven’t wasted all our charitable budget.

In stocks, return is a function of risk. If there’s a chance of a large payoff, there’s an even larger chance of going bust and losing everything. If there’s not very much risk, you get payoffs that are barely larger than inflation. Therefore, you want a balanced investment strategy: have some high-risk investments that might make you rich, and some low-risk investments that have a less awesome payoff.

This also applies to charity donation, which is where we get to Berger and Penna’s concerns. Something like malaria relief is low-risk and relatively low-return. If you distribute malaria nets, it is pretty certain that people are going to have lower rates of malaria. However, there’s not much chance of getting a payoff higher than “people have lower rates of malaria, maybe no malaria at all,” which will save probably millions of lives. Compare this to, say, agronomy or disease research. With agronomy, there is a high chance that you will pour in millions of dollars and get nothing. Most agronomic research gets us, say, wheat that’s a little better at resisting weeds, or better understanding of the ideal growing conditions of the chickpea. However, there’s the slim chance that you’ll have another Green Revolution and save literally billions of lives. As effective altruists, we want to invest in both high-risk high-return and low-risk low-return charities.

Another important example of a high-risk low-return charity is a new charity, which I think is important enough that I’m going to talk about it separately. What happens if someone has a brilliant new idea about how to help people in the developing world? There’s potentially a high payoff if they can beat the current most effective charity; but new ideas for effective charities are probably not going to pay off, if for no other reason than ‘most new ideas are terrible.’ It is really important that we invest in new ideas.

What happens to a low-risk high-return charitable investment? Well, it is clearly the most effective place to donate and becomes our new baseline, and the same trilemma survives. Other charities are either comparable, and thus either higher return but higher risk or lower return but lower risk, or incontrovertibly better and the new baseline.

Please note that I’m not saying the individual should donate multiple places. Probably any individual only has time to investigate one family of charities and – for that matter – gets the most warm fuzzies from only one charity. I think that most people should probably only donate to one charity, because they can be certain they’re donating to the most effective charity they can. But what that charity is is different for different people. And, no, a hypothetical effective altruist society won’t totally lack scientific research.

Scott:

I think I disagree with this. That is, I’m sure I disagree with what I think it says, and I think it says what I think it says. I think it confuses two important issues involving marginal utility – call them disaster aversion and low-hanging fruit – and that once we separate them out we can see that diversifying isn’t necessary in quite the way Ozy thinks.

Disaster aversion is why we try to diversify our investments in the stock market. Although there’s a bit of money maximization going on – more money would always be nice – there’s also an incentive to pass the bar of “able to retire comfortably” and a big incentive to avoid going totally broke. This incentive works differently in charity.

Suppose you offer me a 66% chance of dectupling my current salary, and a 33% chance of reducing my current salary to zero (further suppose I have no savings and there is no safety net). Although from a money-maximizing point of view this is a good deal, in reality I’m unlikely to take it. It would be cool to be ten times richer, but the 33% chance of going totally broke and starving to death isn’t worth it.

Now suppose there is a fatal tropical disease that infects 100,000 people each year. Right now the medical system is able to save 10,000 of those 100,000; 90,000 get no care and die. You offer me a 66% chance of dectupling the effectiveness of the medical system, with a 33% chance of reducing the effectiveness of the system to zero. In this case, it seems clear that the best chance is to take the offer – the expected value is saving 56,000 lives, 46,000 more than at present.

The stock market example and the tropical disease example are different because while your first dollar matters much more to you then your 100,000th dollar, the first life saved doesn’t matter any more than the 100,000th. We can come up with strained exceptions – for example, if the disease kills so many people that civilization collapses, it might be important to save enough people to carry on society – but this is not often a concern in real-life charitable giving.

By low-hanging fruit, I mean that some charities are important up to a certain point, after which they become superseded by other charities. For example, suppose there is a charity researching a cure for Disease A, and another one researching a cure for Disease B. It may be that one of the two diseases is very simple, and even a few thousand dollars worth of research would be enough to discover an excellent cure. If we invest all our money in Disease A simply because it seems to be the better candidate, the one billionth dollar invested in Disease A will be less valuable than the first dollar invested in Disease B, since that first dollar might go to hire a mediocre biologist who immediately spots that the disease is so simple even a mediocre biologist could cure it.

This is also true with more active charities. For example, the first bed net goes to the person who needs bed nets more than anyone else in the entire world. The hundred millionth bed net goes to somebody who maaaaaybe can find some use for a bed net somewhere. It’s very plausible that buying the first bed net is the most effective thing you can do with your dollar, but buying the hundred millionth bed net is less effective than lots of other things.

In this case, at any one time there is only one best charity to donate to, but this charity changes very quickly. In a completely charity-naive world, Disease A might be the best charity, but after Disease A has received one million dollars it might switch to Disease B until it gets one million dollars, and then back to Disease A for a while, and then over to bed nets, and so on.

We can turn this into a complicated game theory problem where everyone donates simultaneously without knowledge of the other people’s donations, and in this case I think the solution might be seek universalizability and donate to charities in exactly the proportion you hope everyone else donates – which would indeed be a certain amount to Disease A, a certain amount to Disease B, and a certain amount to bed nets, in the hope of picking all the low-hanging fruit before you subsidize the less efficient high-hanging-fruit-picking.

But in reality it’s not a complicated game theory problem. You can go on the Internet and find more or less what the budget of every charity is. That means that for you, at this point in time, there is only one most efficient charity. Unless you are Bill Gates, it is unlikely that the money you donate will be so much that it pushes your charity out of the low-hanging fruit category and makes another one more effective, so at the time you are donating there is one best charity and you should give your entire donation to it.

Granted, people are not able to directly perceive utility and will probably err on exactly what this charity is. But I think the pattern of errors will be closer to the ideal if everyone is trying to donate to the charity they consider highest marginal value at this particular time rather than if everyone is trying to diversify.

The reasons for diversifying in the stock market are based on individual investors’ desire not to go broke and don’t really apply here.

Consider the possibility that it is gravity. In statements like “Sentencing guidelines should take into account the gravity of the offense”, the words “gravity” and “immorality” are used interchangeably. Gravitational language informs our moral discourse in other ways too: immoral people are described as “fallen”, sin is a “weight” upon the soul, and we worry about society undergoing moral “collapse”. So the argument from common usage (is best argument! is never wrong!) makes a strong case for an unexpected identity between morality and gravity similar to that between (for example) electricity and magnetism.

We can confirm this to the case by investigating inverse square laws. If morality is indeed an unusual form of gravitation, it will vary with the square of the distance between two objects.

Imagine a village of a hundred people somewhere in the Congo. Ninety-nine of these people are malnourished, half-dead of poverty and starvation, oozing from a hundred infected sores easily attributable to the lack of soap and clean water. One of those people is well-off, living in a lovely two-story house with three cars, two laptops, and a wide-screen plasma TV. He refuses to give any money whatsoever to his ninety-nine neighbors, claiming that they’re not his problem. At a distance of a ten meters – the distance of his house to the nearest of their hovels – this is monstrous and abominable.

Now imagine that same hundredth person living in New York City, some ten thousand kilometers away. It is no longer monstrous and abominable that he does not help the ninety-nine villagers left in the Congo. Indeed, it is entirely normal; any New Yorker who spared too much thought for the Congo would be thought a bit strange, a bit with-their-head-in-the-clouds, maybe told to stop worrying about nameless Congolese and to start caring more about their friends and family.

This is, of course, completely rational. New York City, at ten thousand kilometers, is one million times further away from the suffering villagers as the original well-off man’s ten meters. Since moral force decreases with the square of the distance, the moral force of the Congolese on the New Yorker is diminished by a factor of one million squared – that is, one trillion.

At that distance, all one billion Africans matter only 1/1000th as much as would a person at zero distance. There is, in fact, a person at zero distance from the average New Yorker – that New Yorker herself. So we find that our theory predicts that our obligations to the Congo are only one tenth of one percent as important as our obligations to ourselves.

We can confirm this experimentally. This article from 2005 lists private US overseas charitable contributions at $10.7 billion a year. The 2000 US Census gave a population of 281,421,906, meaning that the average American gave $38.02 in overseas charity. This is 0.107% of the average 2005 per capita income of $35,242, compared to a predicted .0100; that is, a margin of error of only about twenty four cents.

(This is why I love physics. You’d never get results that match up to predictions that precisely in the so-called “social sciences”.)

This methodology can be used to answer a seemingly very different problem that many of us face every day: just how far away from a beggar do you need to walk before you don’t have to feel bad about not giving her money?

Suppose the marginal value of an extra dollar to a beggar is ten times its value to a well-off person such as yourself. We start with the money in your pocket, about a meter away from your brain. If you pass right by the beggar then the money may be a meter away from the beggar as well. Distance to both people is equal, so here the moral force exerted by the beggar is ten times stronger than your own moral force: you are clearly obligated to give her the money.

As you double your distance from the beggar to two meters, the moral force of her need decreases by a factor of four; however, she still has a 2.5x greater claim to the money than you do. Even three meters is not sufficient; her claim will be 1.1x as strong as your own.

However, four meters ought to do it. At this distance, the importance of the beggar’s poverty has decreased by a factor of sixteen, while your own moral force has stayed constant. It’s now 1.6x better for you to keep the money for yourself – a comfortable margin of safety.

There has been some discussion on whether it is acceptable to just hang to the far outside of the sidewalk in order to avoid a beggar, or whether this is unethical and it necessary to cross to the entire opposite side of the street. We now have the tools necessary to solve this problem. If you are on a commercial throughway, downtown residential, or other sidewalk listed on this table as having a minimum width of 4m or greater, it is borderline acceptable (ignoring air resistance) simply to move to the other side of the walkway. However, on the smaller neighborhood residential sidewalks, industrial sidewalks and alleyways – not to mention anywhere the beggar is in the middle of the walkway – it is unfortunately necessary to cross all the way to the other side of the street.

Once again, the results of even a back-of-the-envelope calculation like this one mesh admirably with most people’s native intuitions. Just as even a young child who throws a ball will have a “gut feeling” about how long it will stay up in the air, so even people unaware that morality is a variant of gravitation can correctly apply these same “gut feelings” to moral dilemmas.

In summary, morality is a form of gravitation, albeit an unusual one. Calculations performed based on inverse square law assumptions correctly predict most people’s moral actions. Indeed, the majority of human moral behavior make no sense except under these assumptions, and without them our everyday moral reasoning would be ridiculous indeed.

(I should probably mention that from now on I will be preceding the names of leaders in the effective charity movement with the honorific “St”, because people’s social status and recognition ought to accurately track the level of effect they are having on the world. If through persistence and self-sacrifice someone manages to save the lives of a couple dozen people they never met, I don’t think even the harshest advocatus diaboli could object to an impromptu sainting or two.)

First, St. Elie of GiveWell talked about his organization’s efforts trying to research which charities did the most good and defended the idea of radical transparency – GiveWell’s procedure of meticulously recording everything they do and criticizing themselves ad infinitum in an attempt to become better and more evidence-based.

Then Robin Hanson of Overcoming Bias got up and just started Robin Hansonning at everybody. First he gave a long list of things that people could do to improve the effectiveness of their charitable donations. Then he declared that since almost no one does any of these, people don’t really care about charity, they’re just trying to look good. Then he told the room – this beautiful room in the Faculty Club, full of sophisticated-looking charity donors who probably thought they were there to get a nice pat on the back – that they probably thought that just because they were attending an efficient charity talk they weren’t like that, but that probabilistically there was excellent evidence that they were.

I have never seen a group of distinguished Berkeley faculty gain so sudden and intuitive an appreciation for the Athenians who decided to put Socrates to death. I spent the whole speech grinning like an idiot and probably scared Robin a little. And okay, some of that was because I woke up really early to get to the airport today and had become dangerously overtired and mentally imbalanced, but the rest of it was just that he sounds exactly like he does on his blog, he’s a great speaker, and it was just really funny in a train-wreck sort of way to watch a whole room of innocent and basically decent people get Hansonned. The man is one of a kind and his complete and obviously deliberate imperviousness to normal social niceties needs to be declared a national treasure.

But he made some genuinely unsettling points.

One of his claims that generated the most controversy was that instead of donating money to charity, you should invest the money at compound interest, then donate it to charity later after your investment has paid off – preferably just before you die, since donating money after death is legally complicated. His argument, nice and simple, was that the real rate of return on investment has been higher than the growth rate for 3000 years and this pattern shows no signs of changing. If you donate the money today, your donation grows with the growth rate, but if you invest it, it grows with the interest rate. He gave his classic example of Benjamin Franklin, who put his relatively meager earnings into a trust fund to be paid out two hundred years later; when they did, the money had grown to $7 million. He said that the reason people didn’t do this was that they wanted the social benefits of having given money away, which are unavailable if you wait until just before you die to do so.

And darn it, he was totally right. Not about the math – there are severe complications which I’ll bring up later – but about the psychology. On even the most cursory self-examination, my mind totally recoils at the thought of donating everything I’m going to donate to charity in a single lump sum just before I die. It just gibbers “But…but…you need to be a good person before then!” I’m not saying you can’t tear down Robin’s substantive argument in a bunch of good mathematical ways. I’m saying his ad hominem argument about my motivations seems to be true regardless.

Then he started talking about how you should only ever donate to one charity – the most effective. I’d heard this one before and even written essays speaking in favor of it, but it’s always been very hard for me and I’ve always chickened out. What Robin added was, once again, a psychological argument – that the reason this is so hard is that if charity is showing that you care, you want to show that you care about a lot of different things. Only donating to one charity robs you of opportunities to feel good when the many targets of your largesse come up and burdens you with scope insensitivity (my guess is that most people would feel more positive affect about someone who saved a thousand dogs and one cat than someone who saved two thousand dogs. The first person saved two things, the second person only saved one.) In retrospect this is absolutely true and my gibbering recoil at this problem isn’t just Yet Another Cognitive Bias but just good old self-interest.

Now that I have identified what this pattern feels like, I can look back in my memory and notice more examples. Probably the worst is that an efficient charity group was actually slightly interested in having me interview to work with them back in February-ish and I declined because I already had a career plan – and one from which I could make lots of money to then donate. This may end up being the correct decision and in fact probably is, but I already know that’s not why I did it. I did it because a cognitive paranoia I cultivated for pretty good reasons but can’t turn off at will tells me that doing anything not directly measurable is just my brain lollygagging about and inventing clever stories about why it’s so great, and I only get credit for direct obvious quantitative sacrifice. Working for an efficient charity organization, even if I was able to redirect other people’s money in valuable ways that ended up outweighing the utility of making lots of money myself, wouldn’t be enough to overcome my brain’s suspicion that I wasn’t actually doing any good after all.

Thankfully, Robin’s last point was that the most effective thing to do is to stop beating yourself up and be exactly as irrational as is necessary to convince your mind to go along with the whole “efficient charity thing” instead of freaking out and giving up in disgust. I have already measured about how irrational that is and I don’t see too much reason to change my decision now. Still, no sainthood for me just yet.

So let’s get to the fun part. How do we debunk Robin’s assertion that we should invest charitable givings and donate them only at the end of our lives?

St. Elie discussed this for a little while at the talk and gave what I thought was an unexpectedly good answer. He said that the world is getting better so quickly that we are running out of good to be done. After the initial burst of astonishment he explained: in the 1960s, the most cost-effective charity was childhood vaccinations, but now so many people have donated to this cause that 80% of children are vaccinated and the remainder are unreachable for really good reasons (like they’re in violent tribal areas of Afghanistan or something) and not just because no one wants to pay for them. In the 1960s, iodizing salt might have been the highest-utility intervention, but now most of the low-iodine areas have been identified and corrected. While there is still much to be done, we have run out of interventions quite as easy and cost-effective as those. And one day, God willing, we will end malaria and maybe we will never see a charity as effective as the Against Malaria Fund again.

St. Paul lists several other reasons on his blog. First of all, the US’ tax deduction laws favor spreading your donations out among as many years as possible. Second, you might become a worse person in fifty years and decide you don’t want to give your massive accumulated savings to the poor after all. He also lists a few other arguments, none of which in my opinion have quite the same power as those two.

Most of the people at the meeting today were not radical singularitarians – not all saints can be prophets. But if you believe, as I do, that we’re within about a century of a technological singularity of some sort or other, three new considerations come into play. First, affecting the singularity – either bringing it forward, pushing it backwards, or changing its nature – may be a unique and fantastically high-leverage charity target which will not be available (or may be less available) fifty years from now. Second, if a singularity goes wrong and kills us all, we lose our opportunity to donate to charity later. Third, if a singularity goes right, it’s a pretty good bet that people won’t need malaria nets anymore.

Suppose I will die at age 78 – ie fifty years from now. And suppose I want to donate $10,000 to charity. If I decide against Robin’s strategy, I donate $10,000 today, perhaps to Ethiopia. Ethiopia has a growth rate of about 7%, but let’s assume it can’t keep that up over the next 50 years and its average is 5% (this is still quite high). In 2063 Ethiopia ends up with $115,000 extra or so, which I round off to $150,000 because it can be enjoyed by a couple of generations rather than simply appearing at the end of the period.

Suppose I decide in favor of Robin’s strategy. A couple of investment sites say to expect 7% rate of return, so I can expect about $300,000 (all these numbers are adjusted for inflation, I think).

(if these numbers are right, then using the “efficacy of charity declines as things get better over time” argument means you have to believe in a 50%-in-fifty-years decline in charitable efficacy, which seems like a pretty high bar)

Okay. Now what if the world ends (or progresses beyond the need for charity) in 2062 – forty-nine years from now? In that case, giving now leaves Ethiopia with that $150,000, and waiting till later leaves them with nothing.

I don’t know enough math to do the integral properly, but I can do it at different points and then sum it up. If the world ends in ten years, saving loses $15,000. If the world ends in 20 years, saving loses $25,000. In 30, $45,000. In 40, $70,000. At 49.999, $150,000. If there’s an equal chance of the world ending at any one of those times, on average the world ending before you can donate loses you $60,000. But if the world doesn’t end, saving gains you an extra $150,000. So unless you think the world is more than 70% certain to end before you die, saving like Robin suggests is the best option.

And okay, there are so many problems with this analysis I don’t even know where to start (and I bet commenters will point out ones I missed). I hope someone can do some more rigorous math on this question. But the Fermi calculation gives me the opposite result from the one I was expecting and this is very awkward and I was totally intending to close up this essay with “and therefore, math tells us investing charitable donations is clearly a bad idea.” Instead I’m just going to keep recoiling and gibbering.