Earning to give doesn’t require working for companies that are actively evil with secret malicious blow-the-whistle-on plans, and I don’t think working for such organizations would be a good idea. But if you’re working in tech (ex: me) or finance (ex: Jason Trigg) you can still fit in fine with your coworkers. You don’t “ooze righteousness” or anything. (And I think trying to avoid coming off as “holier than thou” is very important if we don’t want effective altruism to appear arrogant and offputting.)
“you can almost certainly do much more net good by going into engineering, medicine or similar and working very hard at perfecting something which has broad use”
You’re making pretty strong claims (“outperform any plausible amount of giving”) but the only evidence you’re giving seems to be the claim that “in any given job, far more resources will pass through your hands than will be diverted into your bank account”. Each individual doesn’t have that much control over resources passing through their hands, while they have a lot of control over what they do with money they earn and can donate. But let’s look at an example.
As the tech lead for the pagespeed module I’m one of ~10 people working on open source web server software that speeds up ~0.5% of internet page views by ~0.1s. There are about 1M page views per second on the internet, so every second we save people about 500s, or 500 person-years of time every year. That’s 50-years per team member, so you could say through my work I save one life a year. Now for this work I get paid enough enough that I can donate about $100k/year. Donations to the AMF save a life for ~$2.5k but let’s say $5k to be safe. So that’s 20 lives. This is rough, but in my case at least my donations are going about 20x farther than my work. Add in replaceability and that shifts the balance even further in favor of donations.
LW runs on markup. That means quotes that are marked with a ( > ) at the beginning get formatted nicely while quotes that are just marked with ” at the start and end don’t.
Well, most jobs don’t save or destroy many lives, but if you are planning your career around doing the most good—And the earning to give argument has only limited applicability to people who are already on a career track—then you can pick a job that does.
“working at vampire squid headquarters...”
Earning to give doesn’t require working for companies that are actively evil with secret malicious blow-the-whistle-on plans, and I don’t think working for such organizations would be a good idea. But if you’re working in tech (ex: me) or finance (ex: Jason Trigg) you can still fit in fine with your coworkers. You don’t “ooze righteousness” or anything. (And I think trying to avoid coming off as “holier than thou” is very important if we don’t want effective altruism to appear arrogant and offputting.)
“you can almost certainly do much more net good by going into engineering, medicine or similar and working very hard at perfecting something which has broad use”
You’re making pretty strong claims (“outperform any plausible amount of giving”) but the only evidence you’re giving seems to be the claim that “in any given job, far more resources will pass through your hands than will be diverted into your bank account”. Each individual doesn’t have that much control over resources passing through their hands, while they have a lot of control over what they do with money they earn and can donate. But let’s look at an example.
As the tech lead for the pagespeed module I’m one of ~10 people working on open source web server software that speeds up ~0.5% of internet page views by ~0.1s. There are about 1M page views per second on the internet, so every second we save people about 500s, or 500 person-years of time every year. That’s 50-years per team member, so you could say through my work I save one life a year. Now for this work I get paid enough enough that I can donate about $100k/year. Donations to the AMF save a life for ~$2.5k but let’s say $5k to be safe. So that’s 20 lives. This is rough, but in my case at least my donations are going about 20x farther than my work. Add in replaceability and that shifts the balance even further in favor of donations.
I am reminded of an old Robin Hanson post on “helpful” professions.
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2006/12/do_helping_prof.html
LW runs on markup. That means quotes that are marked with a ( > ) at the beginning get formatted nicely while quotes that are just marked with ” at the start and end don’t.
Well, most jobs don’t save or destroy many lives, but if you are planning your career around doing the most good—And the earning to give argument has only limited applicability to people who are already on a career track—then you can pick a job that does.