The tithe is a well-established Schelling point, and one that I follow. 10% Jaibot and Bride of Jaibot of income goes to GiveWell's top charities. I Use Google's one-a-day app for non-optimal warm fuzzies, and I pitch in to explicitly rationalist causes like MIRI or helping a dying person afford cryonics.

(here is where I notice Ambien kicking in. Post becomes less reliably representative of Jai from here on out.

The important thing is to measure yourself against what you are: You are a human. Humans are not very good at world optimization, when left to their own devices. They knock things over and cheat and steal - and some goof comes of it, sometimes...but if you can take actions to make life better for people, at all, you're already winning. You made the choice that almost no one else made, the choice which you amplified and echoes after you made it: "I want to help. I realy want to help. I don't mean "look busy" or "be complimented", I mean "alter the state of the world such that everyine gets the things they would want if they were better at being the sort of person I want them to gtow ::falls down::

You should err in both directions. If you aren't at risk of burning out, you aren't donating enough. Even if you have a 90% chance of burning out at 10% of your income, that's better than donating less than 1%.

I probably won't increase that until I have a lot of savings, like on the order of several months of salary.

I see that people have very different attitudes to money. To me, several months of salary is not a lot of savings, but a very precarious amount. I would be uncomfortable without savings of several years of salary, and the ideal minimum amount would be enough to live on indefinitely without drawing on the capital.

I don't miss trains either.

I was hoping that answering "How did you decide how much of your income to give to charity?" is obviously one way of answering my original question, and so some people would answer that. But you may be right that it's too ambiguous.