Related to: People who want to save the world
I have recently been diagnosed with cancer, for which I am currently being treated with good prognosis. I've been reevaluating my life plans and priorities in response. To be clear, I estimate that the cancer is responsible for much less than half the total danger to my life. The universals - X-risks, diseases I don't have yet, traffic accidents, etc. - are worse.
I would like to affirm my desire to Save Myself (and Save The World For Myself). Saving the world is a prerequisite simply because the world is in danger. I believe my values are well aligned with those of the LW community; wanting to Save The World is a good applause light but I believe most people want to do so for selfish reasons.
I would also like to ask LW members: why do you prefer to contribute (in part) towards humankind-wide X-risk problems rather than more narrow but personally important issues? How do you determine the time- and risk- tradeoffs between things like saving money for healthcare, and investing money in preventing an unfriendly AI FOOM?
It is common advice here to focus on earning money and donating it to research, rather than donating in kind. How do you decide what portion of income to donate to SIAI, which to SENS, and which to keep as money for purely personal problems that others won't invest in? There's no conceptual difficulty here, but I have no idea how to quantify the risks involved.
That's often quoted as the reason for this, but I believe that a bigger factor is that Americans have a long tradition of "tithing", because many of their churches used to be insular and self-sustained by the local communities. With the secularisation of the 20th century, the same attitude has transferred over to all charities, even the non-religious ones.
By contrast, the vast majority of European churches are or used to be established, and financed themselves primarily through state support, their own income (land ownership and such), or both. You weren't expected to have to feed your village priest; in most Western European languages, "tithe" is a purely historical term.
So, while charity in Europe is something many people do, usually it happens irregularly as a form of impulse spending, or by giving to a specific cause or organisation that you have been helped by in the past. You're certainly not expected to donate regularly unless you're really ultra-rich (and even then, I doubt many would be seriously offended), and vice-versa, to talk openly about whom or what you donated money to would probably come off really, really awkward, like you're bragging about your generosity.
That makes sense too, but I was looking at it from the other side - people know they need to rely on the churches for support in the US, so they stay with them so they have that support network in case of illness or disability. On the other hand in Europe people have felt free to leave churches because their taxes pay for that support.
In the UK, at least, there's even quite an anti-charity stance by a number of people, who consider it the State's role to, for example, provide foreign aid or fund cancer research, and condider donating directly to those causes to be encouraging the State to abrogate its responsibility.