I (and many others) recently received an email about the Lightcone fundraiser, which included:
Many people with (IMO) strong track records of thinking about existential risk have also made unusually large personal donations, including …, Zac Hatfield-Dodds, …
and while I’m honored to be part of this list, there’s only a narrow sense in which I’ve made an unusually large personal donation: the $1,000 I donated to Lightcone is unusually large from my pay-what-I-want budget, and I’m fortunate that I can afford that, but it’s also much less than my typical annual donation to GiveWell. I think it’s plausible that Lightcone has great EV for impartial altruistic funding, but don’t count it towards my efffective-giving goal—see here and here.
(I’ve also been happy to support Lightcone by attending and recommending events at Lighthaven, including an upcoming metastrategy intensive, and arranging a donation swap, but don’t think of these as donations)
Yeah, seems like a reasonable critique. In general I feel confused how to best do this kind of social proof. I know that many (especially lower-context) donors care a lot about it, but it’s hard to communicate the exact level of endorsement in an email that already was straining the lengths of what is reasonable to send out to lower-context people.
On reflection, I feel like I shouldn’t have put you on the list, given that the $1,000 feels too small to be called “unusually large”.
For what it’s worth I think this accurately conveys “Zac endorses the Lightcone fundraiser and has non-trivially donated”, and dropping the word “unusually” would leave the sentence unobjectionable; alternatively maybe you could have dropped me from the list instead.
I just posted this because I didn’t want people to assume that I’d donated >10% of my income when I hadn’t :-)
I (and many others) recently received an email about the Lightcone fundraiser, which included:
and while I’m honored to be part of this list, there’s only a narrow sense in which I’ve made an unusually large personal donation: the $1,000 I donated to Lightcone is unusually large from my pay-what-I-want budget, and I’m fortunate that I can afford that, but it’s also much less than my typical annual donation to GiveWell. I think it’s plausible that Lightcone has great EV for impartial altruistic funding, but don’t count it towards my efffective-giving goal—see here and here.
(I’ve also been happy to support Lightcone by attending and recommending events at Lighthaven, including an upcoming metastrategy intensive, and arranging a donation swap, but don’t think of these as donations)
Yeah, seems like a reasonable critique. In general I feel confused how to best do this kind of social proof. I know that many (especially lower-context) donors care a lot about it, but it’s hard to communicate the exact level of endorsement in an email that already was straining the lengths of what is reasonable to send out to lower-context people.
On reflection, I feel like I shouldn’t have put you on the list, given that the $1,000 feels too small to be called “unusually large”.
For what it’s worth I think this accurately conveys “Zac endorses the Lightcone fundraiser and has non-trivially donated”, and dropping the word “unusually” would leave the sentence unobjectionable; alternatively maybe you could have dropped me from the list instead.
I just posted this because I didn’t want people to assume that I’d donated >10% of my income when I hadn’t :-)