One. Charity, up to a point, is not necessarily a trade-off. Just as adding a hobby can make you more productive at work by forcing you to be efficient with your time, adding a charitable commitment can force you to stop wasting money. There is a reason why the Judaeo-Christian tradition recommends tithing; a tenth of income is a good rule of thumb for an amount that’s significant but not enough to make you noticeably poorer.
Two. When people have personal problems as a result of altruism, I suspect it’s the nature of the charity (futurist ideas sound useless to a lot of people) or the nature of the commitment (giving more than a tenth of income, for example) or some interpersonal issue that the altruist doesn’t understand. I want to emphasize that last possibility. If you know you have Asperger’s, you should be extra skeptical about your own ability to explain interpersonal behavior.
At small levels of expenditure (<5% disposable income) , charitable spending is such a small expenditure that of course it won’t make enough of a difference to negatively impact you enough that you notice.
My strong suspicion is that if existential risk reducers could and wanted to pull off the trick of only devoting 5% of their spare mental energy existential risks, then there would be no problem, either in my case or in the cases of the people I mentioned.
Perhaps there would be a problem with cognitive dissonance, but you could still apply the 5% rule: discount the extent to which you care about humanity as a whole versus near-mode things by a factor of 20.
Two points:
One. Charity, up to a point, is not necessarily a trade-off. Just as adding a hobby can make you more productive at work by forcing you to be efficient with your time, adding a charitable commitment can force you to stop wasting money. There is a reason why the Judaeo-Christian tradition recommends tithing; a tenth of income is a good rule of thumb for an amount that’s significant but not enough to make you noticeably poorer.
Two. When people have personal problems as a result of altruism, I suspect it’s the nature of the charity (futurist ideas sound useless to a lot of people) or the nature of the commitment (giving more than a tenth of income, for example) or some interpersonal issue that the altruist doesn’t understand. I want to emphasize that last possibility. If you know you have Asperger’s, you should be extra skeptical about your own ability to explain interpersonal behavior.
I wish the concept of “tithing” included spending a tenth of one’s free time trying to optimize.
At small levels of expenditure (<5% disposable income) , charitable spending is such a small expenditure that of course it won’t make enough of a difference to negatively impact you enough that you notice.
My strong suspicion is that if existential risk reducers could and wanted to pull off the trick of only devoting 5% of their spare mental energy existential risks, then there would be no problem, either in my case or in the cases of the people I mentioned.
Perhaps there would be a problem with cognitive dissonance, but you could still apply the 5% rule: discount the extent to which you care about humanity as a whole versus near-mode things by a factor of 20.