It feels like any analysis like this is going to be very sensitive to things that are extremely uncertain, and also that donations in the near future are potentially much more valuable than those in the future (even excluding transformative AI). Although I guess it might be worth flagging that some disagree.
1) If I give to AMF today, what is the total number of lives saved/created? Presumably saving lives today leads to more children in the future, so the earlier we save lives, the more lives we save/create overall.
2) How much do you think that marginal funding opportunities in the future will compare to today? I assume that as EA gets bigger (and the world gets richer) and solves more problems, marginal funding is less effective. My guess is that there is no better time to donate than now.
So while we should have a pure time preference of zero, we might think that donations today are significantly more valuable than those in the future.
Also your kid will possibly have kids, and this very likely would be (one of) the most valuable thing they do. Seems worth considering. I also hope (and to some extent expect) that the benefits that my kids produce would be substantially more significant than you estimate here.
Not trying to come across as too critical. It just seems like any reasonable sensitivity analysis will give effects that vary by orders of magnitude.
Now this next part might be farther from what you were interested in with this post, but I also just don't think that this type of cost-benefit analysis is very compelling to me when I think about the possibility of having kids.
Ozy Brennan has a very nice post called The Life Goals of Dead People. They compare the behavior of people who are excessively guilty and try to never take up space to those of dead people.
I personally feel like I pretty accurately resemble a dead person when I focus excessively on optimizing as an EA (or just on my own professional success). I think too much about how I am failing to live up to a particular standard, and it makes me anxious, depressed, and just worse at everything I am doing. When I take the pressure off of myself, I am generally much happier and productive.
Having kids might negatively effect my donation profile on net. But having kids is (I think) a very important thing to me personally, and I think embracing that is an important part of empowering me to be an active person that makes change in the world. I also think that having kids and doing good in the world might be more directly complementary. Whenever I think about having kids, I think about how I would work to be a better person both for their immediate benefit, and to set a positive example for them. I imagine that parenting would be time and resource intensive, but also would make me a more agentic and moral person.
Interesting, not sure this is an argument for why *you* should have kids. Seems susceptible to the animal welfare arguments around, paying others to be vegan and the like. Maybe the real EA cause area is to get others to have as many kids as possible
It feels like any analysis like this is going to be very sensitive to things that are extremely uncertain, and also that donations in the near future are potentially much more valuable than those in the future (even excluding transformative AI). Although I guess it might be worth flagging that some disagree.
https://www.founderspledge.com/funds/patient-philanthropy-fund
For example,
1) If I give to AMF today, what is the total number of lives saved/created? Presumably saving lives today leads to more children in the future, so the earlier we save lives, the more lives we save/create overall.
2) How much do you think that marginal funding opportunities in the future will compare to today? I assume that as EA gets bigger (and the world gets richer) and solves more problems, marginal funding is less effective. My guess is that there is no better time to donate than now.
So while we should have a pure time preference of zero, we might think that donations today are significantly more valuable than those in the future.
Also your kid will possibly have kids, and this very likely would be (one of) the most valuable thing they do. Seems worth considering. I also hope (and to some extent expect) that the benefits that my kids produce would be substantially more significant than you estimate here.
Not trying to come across as too critical. It just seems like any reasonable sensitivity analysis will give effects that vary by orders of magnitude.
Now this next part might be farther from what you were interested in with this post, but I also just don't think that this type of cost-benefit analysis is very compelling to me when I think about the possibility of having kids.
Ozy Brennan has a very nice post called The Life Goals of Dead People. They compare the behavior of people who are excessively guilty and try to never take up space to those of dead people.
https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/the-life-goals-of-dead-people
I personally feel like I pretty accurately resemble a dead person when I focus excessively on optimizing as an EA (or just on my own professional success). I think too much about how I am failing to live up to a particular standard, and it makes me anxious, depressed, and just worse at everything I am doing. When I take the pressure off of myself, I am generally much happier and productive.
Having kids might negatively effect my donation profile on net. But having kids is (I think) a very important thing to me personally, and I think embracing that is an important part of empowering me to be an active person that makes change in the world. I also think that having kids and doing good in the world might be more directly complementary. Whenever I think about having kids, I think about how I would work to be a better person both for their immediate benefit, and to set a positive example for them. I imagine that parenting would be time and resource intensive, but also would make me a more agentic and moral person.
Interesting, not sure this is an argument for why *you* should have kids. Seems susceptible to the animal welfare arguments around, paying others to be vegan and the like. Maybe the real EA cause area is to get others to have as many kids as possible
* or at least more on the margin, not necessarily as many as possible