Summary: The Open Philanthropy Project (Open Phil) aims to follow what it calls hits-based giving, which means it makes risky bets and many of its grants may end up failing. I agree with this idea and I believe that donors should generally be less risk averse. Good Ventures, the foundation that financially backs Open Phil, behaves more conservatively than a “hits-based” approach would predict, and it probably ought to take greater risks in the interest of doing more good.

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The Giving What We Can pledge serves as a useful way to commit to donating 10% (or more) of your income, and probably also helps show by example that donating this much money is a reasonable and achievable thing to do. I believe it serves as a useful way to commit yourself to donating if you suspect that your commitment might waver. But there are some considerations against signing the pledge, and these considerations look particularly persuasive if you already have a strong commitment to helping the world.

Some of this might be obvious, but I think it’s worth discussing—people often talk about why you should take the pledge but rarely talk about under what circumstances you shouldn’t, and the pledge isn’t the right choice for everyone. These counterpoints I raise don’t cover everything; I’m mostly drawing on my own personal experiences, and I’m sure other people have experiences that I haven’t had.

Losing flexibility

The more you donate, the less money you have to spend on other things, and the tighter your budget becomes. Maybe you’re earning more money than you need, in which case you can donate all your spare income with no trouble.

But it’s important to remember how your money needs will change over time. Maybe you will have no problem keeping up your donations for the next few years, but things could change. You might decide to have children, which will dramatically increase your expenditures (although some people with kids still donate a lot). You might start a startup or a non-profit, or take a job at a non-profit where you won’t be making much. Many people consider pledging in college, when it’s hard to anticipate your expenses as a young adult, and anyone at any age can have unexpected medical expenses or life-changing circumstances. Before you commit to donate some amount of money, make sure you will still be able to afford it in the future.

Most people’s expenditures increase throughout their lives but their income increases as well, so they shouldn’t have a problem keeping up the same rate of donation. That said, do consider whether you expect your income to increase as much or more than your spending.

People might be reluctant to take a job doing direct work if that would compromise their ability to fulfill their pledge. Since there are a lot of opportunities to do good in direct work that may be more valuable than donating 10%, we wouldn’t want to discourage the former in pursuit of the latter.

Overjustification effect

I recently caught myself following this chain of reasoning:

1. I would like to donate a sizable chunk of my income in 2017 because donating money helps the world.
2. I pledged to donate 20% of my income, so I need to donate at least $25,000.
3. Therefore I will donate $25,000, because I pledged that I would.
4. If I donate $25,000, max out my 401(k), and exercise my stock options, I will have negative cash flow for 2017. That is bad.
5. Of these three big expenditures, the pledge is the least important, since keeping my word on something like this doesn’t matter as much as being able to retire comfortably. So maybe I should donate less.¹

This reasoning obviously doesn’t make sense—I initially wanted to donate because I thought it would help the world, not just because it’s what I said I would do. But after I promised to donate 20% of my income, I forgot my original motivation and only thought about the pledge.

This is a version of the overjustification effect: if you get an extrinsic incentive to do something, it reduces your intrinsic motivation. I saw this happen to myself when taking the pledge reduced my intrinsic motivation to donate. Fortunately, I figured out what happened and reminded myself that donating money has inherent value and it’s not only about keeping a promise.

So even though you give yourself an external incentive to increase your commitment to doing a good thing, sometimes it can paradoxically decrease your commitment by reducing your intrinsic motivation. This could even reduce how much you donate—perhaps you would have donated 15%, but since you pledged to donate 10%, now you only donate the amount that you committed to.

Conclusion

I believe that people usually should take the Giving What We Can pledge. Most people in the effective altruism community donate less than 10% of their income—if more people took the pledge, we would see more donations, which would help the world. If you suspect that your future commitment to doing good may waver, you could take the pledge as a way to keep yourself on track. But before you do take it, consider some relevant factors:

1. Are you going to need a lot of money at some point in the future, such that it will become harder for you to keep donating as much?
2. Might you want to focus a lot of time on doing good in some way that prevents you from making much money, such as starting a non-profit; and if so, would you be able to continue donating the same percentage of your income?

I expect most people should be able to donate 10% of their income (although I’m not in a great position to judge since I have been lucky enough never to have to live on a low salary). I pledged to donate 20% of my income, and while I expect that I will always be able to donate that much, it does substantially limit me in some ways—most obviously, it makes it harder for me to switch to a job that pays a low salary. I regret pledging to donate this much, and perhaps I should not have pledged at all. I do place high value on keeping my word, so the Giving What We Can pledge could potentially help keep me committed; but I was already committed to donating and probably would have donated as much if I had not signed the pledge, so signing it only imposed limits on me without providing any benefits.

Some readers may be in a similar position to where I was before I signed the Giving What We Can pledge. If so, you should consider what benefits the pledge provides you and how it might hurt you, and decide if it makes sense given your personal circumstances.

Notes

Counterfactuals matter. When you’re taking a job, you should care about who would take the job if you didn’t, and how much worse a job than you they’d do.

This matters from the other side too: employers should consider counterfactuals when deciding who to hire. Suppose you’re an employer and considering hiring a promising employee. What would a prospective employee do if you didn’t hire them? How good is it compared to working for you?

If a particular candidate cares a lot about improving the lives of sentient beings, they’d probably do something valuable even if they didn’t get hired, and this should count as a consideration against hiring them.

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Like the last time I wrote something like this, my suggestions here could apply to any large foundation. But most large foundations don’t care at all about what I say, and the Open Philanthropy Project cares at least a tiny bit about what I say, so I’m going to focus on Open Phil.

The Open Philanthropy Project ought to prioritize wild animal suffering (WAS). Here’s why:

1. WAS is important and neglected.
2. WAS is not tractable for most actors, but it’s tractable for Open Phil.

(Previously I discussed some of my issues with the importance/neglectedness/tractability framework, but I believe it works reasonably well for our purposes here.)

Why wild animal suffering matters

The problem of wild animal suffering has enormous scale. There exist far more sentient wild animals than there do humans or factory-farmed animals. Wild animal suffering dwarfs all other problems that currently exist. Some other problems (such as existential risk) may matter more, but WAS is certainly the biggest problem that’s happening right now.

Additionally, wild animal suffering is neglected: hardly anyone cares about this problem, and of the people who care, hardly any of them are trying to do anything about it. Animal Ethics is the only organization spending non-trivial time on the problem of wild animal suffering, and it’s a small organization with limited staff time and narrow focus–I see room for much, much more work on reducing suffering in the wild than what Animal Ethics does currently.

Why Open Phil should prioritize wild animal suffering

For people who care about animals, their biggest objection to reducing wild animal suffering is that it’s intractable. But this is mistaken: we can do lots of things right now to work toward reducing wild animal suffering. (If you doubt that we can do anything about wild animal suffering, please, please read my essay on this subject, and if you disagree, leave a comment explaining why.)

Even given the sad state of WAS research, we already have some concrete proposals for how to reduce wild animal suffering without risking big negative side effects. For example, Brian Tomasik has suggested paying farmers to use humane insecticides. Calculations suggest that this could prevent 250,000 painful deaths per dollar. This intervention alone looks much more cost-effective than GiveDirectly even if we heavily discount insects’ capacity for suffering. And this is just an initial idea; surely there exist much more effective interventions than this, and we could find them if we spent more time looking.

Reducing suffering in the wild is probably much more tractable than most people tend to think. That said, if you want to work on wild animal suffering, you either need specific relevant skills (which are rare and hard to develop) or you need to fund an organization doing relevant work; and right now Animal Ethics is the only such organization. We have something of a coordination problem here where people won’t work on wild animal suffering because they can’t get funding, and people don’t want to fund it because so few people are working on it.

What we need is a large, committed source of funding to jump-start the cause. If the Open Philanthropy Project began funding work on wild animal suffering, it could stimulate new research efforts or small-scale interventions by offering grants. Specifically, Open Phil should probably create a new focus area for wild animal suffering and possibly hire dedicated staff. This problem has such large scale, and so many possible interventions, that it absolutely deserves to be a dedicated focus area. Open Phil might consider lumping WAS under its farm animal welfare program, but this would excessively constrain its budget and limit the amount of staff time that it could receive. Wild animal suffering is a massive problem, and easily deserves as much attention as most of Open Phil’s other focus areas.

Starting about seven years ago, every time I heard a song that I really liked that stuck with me for the rest of the day, I recorded it in my journal on a list of “Songs of the Day”.

This list shows how my musical tastes have shifted over the years. It isn’t entirely representative because there are plenty of songs I love that never made it onto this list.

Here’s the complete list up to the time of this writing. An asterisk means that I liked the song before it was Song of the Day, but I gained a new appreciation for it on that day. I have a corresponding Spotify playlist, although it only includes songs up to November 2015.

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I wrote this as a quick explanation of why I value non-human animals the way I do. It’s not particularly thorough, and my explanation has some clear holes; this is just a general outline.

When we’re considering charitable interventions that help animals, it’s important to have some sense of how valuable it is to help those animals, which means we want to know how sentient they are.

How sentient an animal is–that is, how strongly it experiences pleasure and pain–almost certainly relates to how its brain works. I see four reasonably plausible ways that sentience could relate to brain size:

1. Suffering is caused by certain fixed brain structures, and for certain types of physical pain (like what chickens experience on factory farms), humans and chickens have the same brain parts and therefore experience this pain equally.
2. Sentience is linear with brain size.
3. Sentience is sub-linearly related to brain size; for example, sentience may be logarithmic with brain size.
4. Less intelligent animals are generally more sentient because they “are [not] capable of intelligently working out what is good for [them], and what damaging events [they] should avoid”, so they need a stronger pain response to compensate.

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Lots of people accept that wild animal suffering is a big problem, but they believe it’s completely intractable. I even see some people claim that it’s one of the biggest problems in the world, but we still shouldn’t try to do anything about it. Wild animal suffering is in fact much more tractable than most people believe.

If we think wild animal suffering is a pressing problem and we want to do something about it, what can we do?

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If I’m wrong about anything, I want you to change my mind. I want to make that as easy as possible, so I’m going to give a list of charities/interventions and say what would convince me to support each of them.

Please try to change my mind! I prefer public discussions so the best thing to do is to comment on this post or on Facebook, but if you want to talk to me privately you can email me or message me on Facebook.

My Current Position

I discuss how I got to my current position here. Here’s a quick summary:

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I recently wrote about values spreading, and came out weakly in favor of focusing on global catastrophic risks over values spreading. However, I neglected an important consideration in favor of values spreading: feedback loops.

When we try to take actions that will benefit the long-term future but where we don’t get immediate feedback on our actions, it’s easy to end up taking actions that do nothing to achieve our goals. For instance, it is surprisingly difficult to predict in advance how effective a social intervention will be. This gives reason to be skeptical about the effectiveness of interventions with long feedback loops.

Interventions on global catastrophic risks have really, really bad feedback loops. It’s nearly impossible to tell if anything we do reduces the risk of a global pandemic or unfriendly AI. An intervention focused on spreading good values is substantially easier to test. An organization like Animal Ethics can produce immediate, measurable changes in people’s values. Measuring these changes is difficult, and evidence for the effectiveness of advocacy is a lot weaker than the evidence for, say, insecticide-treated bednets to prevent malaria. But short-term values spreading still has an advantage over GCR reduction in that it’s measurable in principle.

Still, will measurable short-term changes in values result in sustainable long-term changes? That’s a harder question to answer. It certainly seems plausible that values shifts today will lead to shifts in the long term; but, as mentioned above, interventions that sound plausible frequently turn out not to work. Values spreading may not actually have a stronger case here than GCR reduction.

We can find feedback loops on GCR reduction that measure proxy variables. This is particularly easy in the case of climate change, where we can measure whether an intervention reduces greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere. But we can also find feedback loops for something like AI safety research: we might say MIRI is more successful if it publishes more technical papers. This is not a particularly direct metric of whether MIRI is reducing AI risk, but it’s still a place where we can get quick feedback.

Given that short-term value shifts don’t necessarily predict long-term shifts, and that we can measure proxy variables for global catastrophic risk reduction, it’s non-obvious that values spreading has better feedback loops than GCR reduction. There does seem to be some sense in which value shifts today and value shifts in a thousand years are more strongly linked than, say, number of AI risk papers published and a reduction in AI risk; although this might just be because both involve value shifts–they may not actually be that strongly tied, or tied at all.

Values spreading appears to have the advantage of short-term feedback loops. But it’s not clear that these changes have long-term effects, and this claim isn’t any easier to test than the claim that GCR work today reduces global catastrophic risk.

Owen Cotton-Barratt of the Global Priorities Project wrote an article on comparing human and animal interventions. His major conclusions include:

1. Indirect long-term effects dominate considerations.
2. Changing behavior of far-future humans matters more than alleviating immediate animal suffering.
3. Helping humans has better flow-through effects than helping non-human animals.

The analysis effectively concludes that helping humans is more important than helping non-human animals but I believe it misses a few important considerations.

(These are fairly quick thoughts about which I have a lot of uncertainty; I’m publishing them here for the sake of making the conversation public.)

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