Giving from the heart

Rekindling energy for personal giving

On Wednesday, my husband and I made a donation to the American Meat Producers Association to oppose the Save Our Bacon Act, a rider to the Senate Farm Bill that would undo state animal welfare laws like California’s Prop 12, which bans the sale of gestation crate pork and other meat from animals kept in extreme confinement, and stop states from passing any new welfare laws. I also called my Senators to (in their case) thank them for their public opposition to the bill, and urge them to also reject a compromise that would preserve existing laws but preempt new ones.

You can see posts by Dwarkesh Patel and Bentham’s Bulldog¹ for more context on SOB and what you can do if you want to help. There’s been heartening momentum — since we made our donation, one of the most entrenched supporters of the bill has withdrawn his support (those close to the situation think this was likely as a direct response to AMPA ads targeting him), and the Manifold Market on the SOB Act dropped from ~26% chance it would pass to ~14%.

I don’t look much at this vast dark part of the world these days. When we made the decision to give, I cried. I cried at the thought of billions of animals living in pain and darkness from birth to death. And I cried at the immense, almost grotesque, power that we had to bestow grace on these creatures with the click of a button. Power we almost never choose to exercise.

I have complicated feelings about this donation. The whole deal with EA is that you’re supposed to try to have as much impact as you can with your resources, and according to my views, helping to save the country’s animal welfare laws was extremely unlikely to be the highest impact use of that money. I expect that superintelligent AI will likely be unleashed on the world in a matter of years, and this will determine the entire course of civilization from here on out. Ensuring that this monumental transition doesn’t end in disaster, and shaping it for the better, is by far the most important priority right now.

But I hate factory farming. I hate the callousness and venality of those on the other side of this battle. In an hour of urgent need, as the troops were being rallied, I hated the idea of looking these animals in the eye and saying I wouldn’t join their fight because we had to invest everything now so we could have as much money as possible to run AI agents doing technical safety experiments during crunch time, or bid on galaxies after the Singularity.

It was not the highest impact thing we could have spent that money on, but this fight truly moved me to give. I haven’t experienced that in a long while, and I hope to hold onto it.

When I was twenty, I led a gaggle of other college students to take the Giving What We Can Pledge to give 10% of our annual income to the most effective charities.² While I’m pretty sure I’ve given away more than 10% of my total income over the last eleven years, I honestly haven’t tracked it very systematically.

At the time that I took the Pledge, I assumed (per the standard EA career advice at the time) that I would earn to give as a software engineer or trader after I graduated. Instead, I ended up graduating early to join Open Philanthropy (now Coefficient Giving).

Very quickly, it became clear that I had influence over orders of magnitude more money than I could give myself. And my work was mentally exhausting.³ Personal giving decisions, which I envisioned being an intellectually and spiritually invigorating change of pace from a standard corporate job, became an awkward afterthought. The opportunities I understood best were very well funded (at least according to me), and I wasn’t really jazzed about tossing in another $15K on top of a $2.4M grant we’d just deliberated over.⁴ For several years I just entered the donor lottery, and thankfully lost every time.

I no longer work for the largest funder of all the causes I care about,⁵ though my husband and I do have substantially more to give than I would on my own. And these days, with increasingly compressed AI timelines and a huge amount of new money about to enter the space and political fundraising operations ramping up ahead of what will probably be the highest-spending and highest-stakes midterm and general election in US history, there’s now more energy around individual giving than there has ever been since the very early days of EA and the idea of earning to give. A big part of my impetus for giving to this now was the sense of running out of time to do anything good with the money, a worry that we would just go to our grave with it.

I don’t fully endorse this impulse,⁶ but there is something in it that I want to honor. My day job is still my top priority, but I don’t want to completely neglect the intellectual, pragmatic, and spiritual question of how best to direct the money my husband and I are stewarding in accordance with our shared values (and I don’t want to die with it). With this blog, I’ve managed to carve out an activity deeply connected to my values, that I systematically invest in, that isn’t just my day job. I hope to get there with our giving too.

1. Note that Bentham’s post says that the donations are many times more cost-effective than the next best animal welfare intervention, but at least at the point we donated I don’t think that was really true; it was perhaps ~30-50% better than the next best farm animal welfare opportunity according to advisors I trust who are following the situation closely. I think the discrepancy is both because we gave at a later time (when the cost-effectiveness had fallen) and because my sources likely had smaller estimates to begin with than Bentham’s sources.

2. At the time I took the pledge, I think it was technically about cost-effectively helping the poorest people in the world; it was later broadened.

3. We tracked our time using Toggl, and I tried to be scrupulous about it, pausing the timer when I went to the bathroom or answered a text message. I was devastated to learn that I only actually tracked hours in the very low 30s this way, even though it felt to me like I was pushing myself really hard and had no slack to do anything complicated outside of work.

4. Many of these organizations were also run by my friends, and allocating all my personal giving to slightly increase my friend’s salary felt like a kind of lame self-dealing.

5. The effect of this is more psychological than practical; I could still have a lot of influence over cG’s giving, as well as the giving of other individuals and institutions who collectively have a lot more to give than me and my husband, if I put effort into this.

6. In fact, the very next day after we made this donation, I found myself in a conversation full of longtermist EAs worrying that all the newly minted billionaires would quickly spend down their money on global health and animal well-being interventions instead of saving it for more removed but ultimately higher-leverage opportunities that crop up during (or even after) the Singularity.