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Sophronius comments on The curse of identity - Less Wrong
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My biggest problem is really that I can't get myself to donate a lot of money. That decision would be met with disbelief by my surroundings. I also fear that, at some point, I might need the money. Otherwise I would have already donated a lot more to the Singularity Institute years ago. As of today I have only donated 3 times, a laughable amount of $30.
And other than money? That takes up a lot of time and effort that I am currently unable to dispense.
Do you mean that people around you would not believe you were donating? Or would not think your cause a good one? Or would tell you that large donations are strange or a bad idea?
I'd really be interested to know, since I've recently started writing on the topic. Hardly anyone is willing to say why they don't give.
For me:
1) The funds I have I might need later, and I'm not willing to take chances on my future. 2) Uncertainty as to whether the money would do much good. 3) Selfishness; my own well-being feels more important than a cause that might save everyone . 4) Potential benefits from SIAI are far and there's no societal pressure for donating money 5) I like money. Giving money hurts. It's supposed to go in my direction dammit.
I do anticipate that if I were to attain a sufficient amount of money (i.e. enough to feel that I don't need to worry about money ever again) I would donate, though probably not exclusively to SIAI.
Edit: Looking at those five points, an idea formulates. What if there was a post exclusively for people to comment and say that they donated (possibly specifying the amount), and receiving karma in return? Strange as it is, karma might be more motivating (near) for some people than the prospect of saving humanity (far!). Just like the promise of extra harry potter fan-fiction.
We did that once.
The results were weird.
It looks as though about half of your objections have to do with SIAI and the other half have to do with charitable donation in general. In my opinion, there are very strong arguments for donating to charity even if the best available charity is much less effective than SI claims to be. If you find these arguments persuasive, you could separate your charitable giving into 2 phases: during the 1st phase, you would establish some sort of foundation and begin gradually redirecting your income/assets to it. During the 2nd phase, you could attempt to figure out what the optimal charity was and donate to it.
I've found that this breaking up of a difficult task into phases helps me a lot. For example, I try to separate the brainstorming of rules for myself to follow and their actual implementation into separate phases.