= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
CarlShulman comments on Donating while in temporary debt (i.e. as a student) - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (36)
Something like "will $100 given today do more good than $107.90 given 1 year from now?"
If that's the case, it seems plausible to me that MIRI and CFAR both have interest rates higher than 7.9%, possibly substantially higher. On the other hand, for an individual, the value of having money now as opposed to later is larger than what interest rates would suggest: having more money now makes it easier for you to quit jobs, move places, obtain training, and generally do things that could substantially affect your earning potential.
If you were alive in 1900 do you think that the best charitable opportunities available to you would have been over 5,000x as valuable as the best ones available today?
Do you think that in 2063 effort spent on the best options then available, will be less than 3% as effective as spending today? Do you think that spending in 2100 will be less effective by a factor of ~746?
Like with most predictions, doing the numbers so far out isn't very accurate. I think a high growth rate for young organizations is reasonable, but certainly not sustainable for something like 50 years. It could be that donating now is the winning option, until your organizations of choice slow their growth down.
The point is: why believe this decade is much better than the 1930s or the 1980s, as well as future decades? You would have found something to do in those decades, what would it have been? And how good would it have been?
Oh, I see. I'm saying "Look, there is a 30% investment right now" and you are saying "Well, if it's true, then it seems like you'll be able to find other 30% investments in the future. Unless you have some evidence that this opportunity is different."
Good point. My evidence for this decade being special is that we only need to build FAI movement once, and the future is by a large extent determined by how the AI researchers react to the challenge. I'll have to think about this point more, though.
"Look, there is a 30% investment right now"
But not one for which you can recapture the proceeds in cash. So a return-on-investment frame can mislead: if your spending compounds at some rate n times, and no more, and you don't get the money back, then over longer time frames it falls further and further behind things that can be reinvested and compound for longer.
Paul's post explains several of these issues pretty nicely.
So you're not talking about the interest rate of a particular charity over time but the interest rate of "the best charity at the time" over time, right? That's a good point but doesn't directly contradict my point.