LESSWRONG
LW

All of null's Comments + Replies

Folding Couch Monitor
KevinHock30

re: Being able to use touchpad: https://www.petekeen.net/mounting-a-magic-trackpad-on-a-kinesis-advantage-keyboard may be a setup you haven't seen before.


(When I had bad RSI I used Kensington Expert Trackball Mouse solely for the ball and Kinesis Dual Pedal for clicking.)

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Offset Norms
KevinHock10

Thanks for expanding on this! :)

I lurked around the EA space for a couple of years, giving a little to AMF, then GiveDirectly, and recently found climate change as the area that resonated with me the most -- causing me to plan to give more than I have in the past. Then I thought, do I regret helping those people, if I believe climate change is the most pressing issue? Thankfully, one of the replies to my question quashed my concern, as a few hundred dollars offsets my previous donations.

I definitely agree with your point that the 10% norm is more important

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Programmers Should Plan For Lower Pay
KevinHock10

Can you talk more about retirement and earning to give? I see you max out your 401k, but am curious how much you have saved for retirement and how much you think you'll need. Retirement fears have been the only cause of trepidation when I think about earning to give.

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3jefftk
I've been putting the max allowed into a pre-tax IRA since I started at Google in 2012. I also put in a little in 2008-2009 when I was at BBN, but much less. We took $10k out, which the IRS let's you do without penalty, when we bought our house. It's invested in index funds, and is currently at $387k. Our house is also a kind of savings/investment. You can think of the mortgage as a combination of rent and forced saving. Figure out how much you'd like to have saved for retirement, and see what that leaves?
Should We Still Fly?
KevinHock00

Thanks for the helpful reply!

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Should We Still Fly?
KevinHock00

Thanks for the helpful reply!

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Should We Still Fly?
KevinHock10

Has there been any discussions of the carbon costs of saving lives? e.g. you save an estimated 100 lives via AMF donations, how much do you need to donate to CATF to offset that? It might help people balance the causes they care about.

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2Tetraspace
Quick estimate: Global average is 4.8 tons per person = $50 additional per year per life saved = ~$1500 total (over 30 additional years of life), so over the course of saving an average person's life the costs if you're buying offsets are the same order as the costs of saving a life via a Givewell charity (~half). For the people helped by Givewell recommended charities, the additional CO2 emissions are probably lower; among the world's poorest, <1 tons of CO2 per capita per year is pretty common, which is <$300 over a lifetime, about an order of magnitude less than the cost of saving a life.
4jefftk
In some ways that's the opposite of how I think about it. If you're considering spending money to make the world better, my view is you should spend that money on whatever most improves the world. If you think that is AMF donations, you should just do that. If you think that is carbon offers, or carbon tax advocacy organizations, you should do that instead. The main model I can think of where you should both give to AMF and also buy offsets for it is one where you're trying to promote a norm that everyone should offset the emissions that come from their decisions. I don't think this norm is likely to catch on, and I think a tax is a much better way to implement something similar.