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My brother in Christ, we are in a thread about Sam Bankman Fried, Caroline Ellison, and the fallout of FTX and you are asking for a source?
How about William McAskill, in his paper Investing to Give?
There's also Sam Harris and Sam Bankman Fried in Sam Harris' podcast.
Ellison herself brought it up during her trial.
Even Scott's arguments against it are lukewarm at best, and he accepts it as a valid practice. The giving pledge is Earning to Give in drag. It's the same mechanics - defer giving for an extended period of time under the nebulous promise that it will do more good in the long run. The giving pledge it simply says that your kids don't get to keep up the grift forever. That doesn't matter much. In the long run, we're all dead.
You can argue that I may have been imprecision in my terminology, but "perpetuity" vs an "entire human lifespan" feels like a distinction without a difference.
Yes, I’m asking for a source. The biggest, most dramatic scammer in the movement doing something does not imply an “awful lot.”
I couldn’t find a talk or paper called Investing to Give. I did see this proposed framework, which doesn’t give a single threshold, and this, where he talks about the theory. But I also note that this guy donates all income past $32,000. It sure sounds like this guy is giving and not just earning.
The baseline level of charity for an American is less than $1300. I’m pretty sure that’s an average, too, and I expect the median is much lower. I am confident that EAs, as a group which self-selects for neurotically caring about this stuff, clear that bar.
Sorry - I was wrong on my title. I was working from memory while on mobile. I'm back at my desk now.
The actual paper is "When should an effective altruist donate", from 2019, by William MacAskill, published by the global priorities institute. He establishes a proposed mathematical framework that determines whether to donate now or later (page 14 of the PDF). Reading through his own definitions above, he sets it up so that it's almost always beneficial to give later. Take the "Values" section. He explicitly state that values are unlikely to change over time. I find that just as unlikely as he finds it likely.
On a deeper note, this goes back to a problem I have with utilitarianism in general and effective Altruism in particular. I used to hang out with some effective Altruists. I also volunteer at an animal shelter, doing unglamorous work that most volunteers don't particularly want to do. My EA acquaintances mocked me for that choice, and earnestly argued that I would be better off quitting my job, moving to a HCoL area, getting paid "what I (was) really worth", then donating back to the animal shelter in question to hire somebody else to "do that kind of work".
I don't talk to them much anymore. I'm still disinfecting ringworm and mending fences at the animal shelter, and they're donating to groups like METR, because that will allegedly do more good than anything I'm doing.
That's the kind of unconsciously classist/condescending attitude that annoys me in EA discourse about the most effective and rational way to donate, and where the people involved would be highly insulted if you flat-out told them they think they are a superior class/caste of people and the lower orders are merely there to do the dirty work. But "hire someone of less value than you to shovel the shit out of the cages" is precisely that attitude at work. Manual labour is not worth much, even if we need it, because it is low paid (and besides soon we'll have robots to do it, so all the manual workers can... evaporate into thin air? get UBI and become creative artists? go back home to Central and South America?)
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What he actually says:
Not really - he lays out seven categories of considerations which he suggests qualitatively scoring from 1 to 7 and summing the scores. If the scores add up to less than 24, the considerations lean in favor of giving now.
What he actually says:
He is in fact saying that the impact of changing values is bigger than the impact of donating now or later.
You've also dodged the fact that the guy is donating all his income past $32k. Hard to accuse him of cynically withholding donations until the future.
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