(This will be mainly of interest to Effective Altruists, and is cross-posted on the Giving What We Can blog, the Intentional Insights blog, and the EA Forum)

When I first started donating, I did so anonymously. My default is to be humble and avoid showing off. I didn’t want others around me to think that I have a stuffed head and hold too high an opinion of myself. I also didn’t want them to judge my giving decisions, as some may have judged them negatively. I also had cached patterns of associating sharing about my good deeds publicly with feelings that I get from commercials, of self-promotion and sleaziness.

I wish I had known back then that I could have done much more good by publicizing my donations and other goods deeds, such as signing the Giving What We Can Pledge to donate 10% of my income to effective charities, or being public about my donations to CFAR on this LW forum post.

Why did I change my mind about being public? Let me share a bit of my background to give you the appropriate context.

As long as I can remember, I have been interested in analyzing how and why individuals and groups evaluated their environment and made their decisions to reach their goals – rational thinking. This topic became the focus of my research as a professor at Ohio State in the history of science, studying the intersection of psychology, cognitive neuroscience, behavioral economics, and other fields.

While most of my colleagues focused on research, I grew more passionate about sharing my knowledge with others, focusing my efforts on high-quality, innovative teaching. I perceived my work as cognitive altruism, sharing my knowledge about rational thinking, and students expressed much appreciation for my focus on helping them make better decisions in their lives. Separately, I engaged in anonymous donations to causes such as poverty alleviation.

Yet over time, I realized that by teaching only in the classroom, I would have a very limited impact, since my students were only a small minority of the population I could potentially reach. I began to consult academic literature on how to spread my knowledge broadly. Through reading classics in the field of social influence such as Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion and Made To Stick, I learned a great many strategies to multiply the impact of my cognitive altruism work, as well as my charitable giving.

One of the most important lessons was the value of being public about my activities. Both Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion and subsequent research showed that our peers deeply impact our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. We tend to evaluate ourselves based on what our peers think of us, and try to model behaviors that will cause others to have positive opinions about us. This applies not only to in-person meetings, but also online communities.

A related phenomenon, social proof, illustrates how we evaluate appropriate behavior based on how we see others behaving. However, research also shows that people who exhibit more beneficial behaviors tend to avoid expressing themselves to those with less beneficial behaviors, resulting in overall social harm.

Learning about the importance of being public, including in online communities that reach far more people than in-person communities, especially by people engaging in socially beneficial habits, led to a deep transformation in my civic engagement. While it was not easy to overcome my shyness, I realized I had to do it if I wanted to optimize my positive impact on the world – both in cognitive altruism and in effective giving.

I shared this journey of learning and transformation with my wife, Agnes Vishnevkin, an MBA and non-profit professional. Together, we decided to co-found a nonprofit dedicated to spreading rational thinking and effective giving to a broad audience using research-based strategies for maximizing social impact, Intentional Insights. Uniting with others committed to this mission, we write articles, blogs, make videos, author books, program apps, and collaborate with other organizations to share these ideas widely.

I also rely on research to make other decisions, such as my decision to take the Giving What We Can pledge. The strategy of precommitment is key here – we make a decision in a state where we have the time to consider their consequences in the long term, and specifically wish to constrain the options of our future selves. That way, we can plan within a narrowed range of options and make the best possible use of the resources available to us.

Thus, I can plan to live on 90% of my income over my lifetime, and plan to decrease some of my spending in the long term so that I can give to charities that I believe are most effective for making the kind of impact I want to see in the world.

Knowing about the importance of publicizing my good deeds and commitments, I recognize that I can do much more good by sharing my decision to take the pledge with others. All of us have friends, and the large majority of us have social media channels and we all have the power to be public about our good deeds. You can also consider fundraising for effective charities, and being an advocate for effective altruism in your community. 

According to the scholarly literature, by being public about our good deeds we can bring about much good in the world. Even though it may not feel as tangible as direct donations, sharing with others about our good deeds and supporting others doing so may in the end allow us to do even more good.

Executive summary: The practice of giving a fixed fraction of one's income to charity is near-universal but possibly indefensible. I describe one approach that certainly doesn't defend it, speculate vaguely about a possible way of fixing it up, and invite better ideas from others.

Many of us give a certain fraction of our income to charitable causes. This sort of practice has a long history:

Deuteronomy 14:22 Thou shalt truly tithe all the increase of thy seed, that the field bringeth forth year by year.

(note that "tithe" here means "give one-tenth of") and is widely practised today:

GWWC Pledge: I recognise that I can use part of my income to do a significant amount of good in the developing world. Since I can live well enough on a smaller income, I pledge that from today until the day I retire, I shall give at least ten percent of what I earn to whichever organizations can most effectively use it to help people in developing countries. I make this pledge freely, openly, and without regret.

And of course it's roughly how typical taxation systems (which are kinda-sorta like charitable donation, if you squint) operate. But does it make sense? Is there some underlying principle from which a policy of giving away a certain fraction of one's income (not necessarily the traditional 10%, of course) follows?

The most obvious candidate for such a principle would be what we might call

Weighted Utilitarianism: Act so as to maximize a weighted sum of utility, where (e.g.) one's own utility may be weighted much higher than that of random far-away people.

But this can't produce anything remotely like a policy of proportional giving. Assuming you aren't giving away many millions per year (which is a fair assumption if you're thinking in terms of a fraction of your salary) then the level of utility-per-unit-money achievable by your giving is basically independent of what you give, and so is the weight you attach to the utility of the beneficiaries.

So suppose that when your income, after taking out donations, is $X, your utility (all else equal) is u(X), so that your utility per marginal dollar is u'(X); and suppose you attach weight 1 to your own utility and weight w to that of the people who'd benefit from your donations; and suppose their gain in utility per marginal dollar given is t. Then when your income is S you will set your giving g so that u'(S-g) = wt.

What this says is that a weighted-utilitarian should keep a fixed absolute amount S-g of his or her income, and give all the rest away. The fixed absolute amount will depend on the weight w (hence, on exactly which people are benefited by the donations) and on the utility per dollar given t (hence, on exactly what charities are serving them and how severe their need is), but not on the person's pre-donation income S.

(Here's a quick oversimplified example. Suppose that utility is proportional to log(income), that the people your donations will help have an income equivalent to $1k/year, that you care 100x more about your utility than about theirs, and that your donations are the equivalent of direct cash transfers to those people. Then u' = 1/income, so you should keep everything up to $100k/year and give the rest away. The generalization to other weighting factors and beneficiary incomes should be obvious.)

This argument seems reasonably watertight given its premises, but proportional giving is so well-established a phenomenon that we might reasonably trust our predisposition in its favour more than our arguments against. Can we salvage it somehow?

Here's one possibility. One effect of income is (supposedly) to incentivize work, and maybe (mumble near mode mumble) this effect is governed entirely by anticipated personal utility and not by any benefit conferred on others. Then the policy derived above, which above the threshold makes personal utility independent of effort, would lead to minimum effort and hence maybe less net weighted utility than could be attained with a different policy. Does this lead to anything like proportional giving, at least for some semi-plausible assumptions about the relationship between effort and income?

At the moment, I don't know. I have a page full of scribbled attempts to derive something of the kind, but they didn't work out. And of course there might be some better way to get proportional giving out of plausible ethical principles. Anyone want to do better?