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rhollerith_dot_com comments on LW was started to help altruists - Less Wrong
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Hunh. A mentor of mine, John David Garcia, said that an altruist should probably ensure the security of his self and his family by, e.g., getting a few million dollars of net family worth and making sure all the kids have gotten a good education (3 of John's 4 children have MDs) before trying to improve the world, which is similar to the point that Pavlina seems to be making.
It's an interesting claim, but there's at least one failure mode-- the altruist spends their life aiming for financial security, but never achieves it. In that case, they would have been more helpful by giving more modestly throughout their career.
This is at least not obviously true to me. The situation you describe seems like a failure mode in hindsight. If the altruist succeeds in earning lots of money and then donates far more than they could have, otherwise, then it would seem in hindsight like the only correct strategy.
In other words, unless you show that a decision always makes you worse off, you have to make some sort of argument about probabilities in order to support your case.
A relevant point I've seen someone make is that if your money is better off invested than given to charity now, the charity you donate to could invest it and get that benefit anyway. So the real question to ask is whether you can invest your money more efficiently than the charity can. It may be overly optimistic of me to think so, but I believe an education for your children, in particular, is such an investment. I don't know about the "few million dollars of net family worth" business (in particular, I've never seen having that much money as a goal I personally have in life) but it's possible there are arguments in that direction.
Edit: I'll leave the end of that sentence there for the record, but I feel bad about it. It's possible there are arguments in that direction; it's possible there are arguments in the other direction; I don't know and I shouldn't take sides just because it seems to parallel my other arguments.