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anholt comments on Giving What We Can, 80,000 Hours, and Meta-Charity - Less Wrong
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I recently sent in my membership for GWWC, and just got confirmation for the larger of my two donations for the year, and this article got me thinking:
The membership form asked me (iirc) what I expected to be donating before learning about GWWC and what I expect after joining GWWC. I filled in the "before" field based on historical behavior (~2% of income). But I think that was a wrong answer on my part -- the main thing that GWWC changed for me was the idea of 10% of income as the focal point. But since I decided to join a year ago, I've encountered the 10% idea elsewhere, in only slightly less persuasive ways, so I probably would have committed to 10% pretty soon anyway. We may be overcounting the impact of GWWC because people whose donation patterns would have gone up over time anyway are not accounting for that (unless you already do in your analysis).
Thanks for this. Asking people "how much would you have pledged?" is of course only a semi-reliable method of ascertaining how much someone actually would have pledged. Some people - like yourself - might neglect that fact that they would have been convinced by the same arguments from other sources; others might be overoptimistic about how their future self would live up to their youthful ideals. We try to be as conservative as reasonable with our assumptions in this area: we take the data and then err on the side of caution. We assumed that 54% of the pledged donations would have happened anyway, that 25% of donations would have gone to comparably good charities, and that we have a dropout rate amortized over time equivalent to 50% of people dropping out immediately. It's possible that these assumptions still aren't conservative enough.
Perhaps it would also be useful to work backwards? That is, figure out exactly how conservative the assumptions need to be to put the value of a donation below the break-even point.
Excellent. That sounds pretty reasonable, and that's pretty impressive leveraging given those assumptions.