Functions of a community standard in the 2%/8% fuzzies/utilons debate

By DirectedEvolution @ 2023-06-07T05:23 (+2)

This is post four in a series arguing for adjusting a core idea of EA: the pledge to donate 10% of one's annual income to an effective charity. This is most well-known in the form of the Giving What We Can pledge.

 In conversation with commenters, I found that I had not sufficiently defined my proposal. Here, I will define my proposed modification unambiguously, and then discuss it in relation to the idea of Schelling points, a common way of explaining why EA advocates for a 10%-income annual donation to effective charities.

Defining the 2%/8% fuzzies-utilons pledge

The key misunderstanding that has arisen in the past is that this calls for a mandatory 2% donation to "ineffective" charities, such as one's alma mater or the opera. This is not what I am calling for. In fact, I personally would prefer if EAs who already give 10% or more to EA charities continued to do so.

Instead, I am calling for EA to center conversations with non-EAs around the idea of a this 2%/8% or 2%/10% variant that I have defined here.

How I think about Schelling points

EAs often use the idea of Schelling points to explain why we have instituted a 10% donation to an effective charity, rather than some other amount, such as 2%, 9%, 11%, 20%, 50%, or "until your material quality of life has degraded to the point that the dysfunction this causes you decreases your ability to donate, perhaps by threatening your performance at work."

For example, in my last post, mhendric explained the specific choice of a 10% donation thus:

EA argues for a duty of beneficence and asks members to donate 10%. 10% is an arbitrary [Sch]elling point. Why not 11%? Why not 12% (you are here)? But consider: why not 13%? (...) Why not 99%? These worries are a classic critique of duties of beneficence, at least since Singer released Famine, Affluence, and Morality.

In a previous post, mhendric expanded on the rationale for a 10% donation:

10% effective donations has brand recognition and is a nice round number, as you point out. It is used by other groups, such as religious groups, making it easy to re-funnel donations to e.g. religious communities to effective charities. This leaves 90% of your income at your disposal, part of which you may spend on fuzzy causes. It does not seem required to me to change the 10% to allow for fuzzy donations, nor do I think there's a motivation to make donations to fuzzy causes morally required. 

First, we are going to start with a note about jargon. In game theory, the notion of a Schelling point is used specifically to refer to a way that players coordinate in the absence of direct communication. A classic example is that two friends separated in New York City without a way to contact each other or a predetermined meeting spot would each go to Grand Central Station (a famous landmark in the city), assuming that the other would also assume that's where to look.

Here, we are using Schelling point in a broader sense that ignores the need to converge on the same solution. Of course, EAs could select their own donation levels, from 0-100% of annual income, and those choices would not necessarily impact the choices of other EAs. There is no actual need for EAs to all donate the same amount, and indeed we don't. Will MacAskill donates 50% of his income to charity, for example, and advocates that the super-rich donate 99% or more of their wealth. Undoubtedly, there are EAs who earn incomes or have obligations such that they understandably feel unable to commit to a 10% annual donation.

This means that a 10% donation standard is not a Schelling point in a game theoretic sense. It is just an arbitary standard, which is a less specific thing.

A more conventional way to refer to an arbitrary practical standard is as a "line in the sand." One sympathetic journalist asks:

... where do we draw the line? If we’re prepared to donate one-third of our incomes to maximize happiness, then why not two-thirds? Why not live in a tent in a park so as to be able to donate 99 percent and prevent even more cases of blindness? 

This journalist, Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, is not describing Giving What We Can, but the 50% donation practice of the trader Matt Wage. Giving What We Can draws the line at 10% to answer objections such as Kristof's.

As another journalist, Gideon Lewis-Kraus writing for the New Yorker puts it:

On the one hand, what makes the movement distinct is its demand for absolute moral rigor, a willingness, as they like to put it, to “bite the philosophical bullet” and accept that their logic might precipitate extremes of thought and even behavior—to the idea, to take one example, that any dollar one spends on oneself beyond basic survival is a dollar taken away from a child who does not have enough to eat. On the other hand, effective altruists, or E.A.s, have recognized from the beginning that there are often both pragmatic and ethical reasons to defer to moral common sense. This enduring conflict—between trying to be the best possible person and trying to act like a normal good person—has put them in a strange position. If they lean too hard in the direction of doing the optimal good, their movement would be excessively demanding, and thus not only very small but potentially ruthless; if they lean too hard in the direction of just trying to be good people, their movement would not be anything special...

Giving What We Can's 10% donation standard can be seen as an arbitary line in the sand, which we draw in order to create a movement that is neither too lax nor too demanding of its members.

I would argue that it's more subtle. In fact, mhendric (who I greatly respect and appreciate for their contributions to the comments on my previous posts) across multiple comments serves as an illustration of the inconsistencies in viewing the 10% standard as 'arbitrary'.

In my last post, they commented:

10% is an arbitrary [Sch]elling point.

Yet in an earlier post, they argued:

10% effective donations has brand recognition and is a nice round number, as you point out. It is used by other groups, such as religious groups, making it easy to re-funnel donations to e.g. religious communities to effective charities.

So the 10% figure is not exactly arbitrary. It is chosen for a specific set of practical reasons - having brand recognition, being a nice round number, and being used by religious groups.

Let's briefly integrate the argument so far as a set of premises. These premises will serve as the starting point for the remainder of the discussion.

Premise 1: The Giving What We Can 10% pledge is best understood not a Schelling point, but as a line in the sand or conventional community standard.

Premise 2: The Giving What We Can 10% pledge is not arbitary, but selected for specific practical reasons.

Premise 3: It is the specific practical problem we are trying to solve with a community standard that determines its optimal structure.

Note: if you do not agree with one or more of these premises, please let me know in the comments! I am genuinely unsure of whether this will be an important objection or not. If this is your belief, you are unlikely to find the remainder of this discussion valid.

Since the Giving What We Can pledge is not functioning as a way for EAs to coordinate in the absence of the ability to communicate, but as a practical community standard, we need to understand what problems we might be trying to solve with such a standard.

mhendric and the aforementioned journalists have already articulated some of them:

I agree with mhendric that these are the three main problems we are trying to solve with our community pledge standard.

With both a 2%/8% fuzzies/utilons pledge and our current Giving What We Can 10% pledge, we achieve an equally sustainable level of giving, while the 2%/10% fuzzies/utilons pledge is equally effective.

So our disagreement is over the other problems.

The 2%/10% choice is slightly less sustainable, since the total donation level is higher, while the 2%/8% choice is slightly less effective, since the effective donation component is lower. These differences are real. But a simple comparison assumes that the choice of pledge does not have an effect on the total amount of donations received. In other words, two people donating $2,000 to the opera and $8,000 to GiveWell contribute more to fighting malaria than one person donating $10,000 to GiveWell. So our more important question is how the choice of standard would motivate donations.

Regarding motivation of donations, let's note that "orienting discussion" and "aligning standards" are things we care about primarily for their instrumental effects in motivating donations. Maintaining consistency is something we care about to both motivate and sustain donations. How our choice of community standard affects the inflow and outflow of committed donors is what's truly at issue.

My arguments for a 2%/8% fuzzies/utilons standard have made similar appeals to a practical benefit for sustainability and motivation.

First, my perception is that the "10% to effective causes" standard orients the discussion in a way that encourages many to interpret us as follows:

Nicholas Kristof's article above doesn't engage with a 10% standard - more like a 30-50% standard. But Kristof explicitly articulates the second idea - that EA wants him to make 100% of his donations to our preferred charities.

In fact, a sophisticated EA might point out that he could donate 10% to EA charities, and then extra on top of that to whatever causes he prefers (in line with my 2%/10% pledge). But that is not what Kristof took away from his discussion with Matt Wage.

I believe it's well known that EA has a reputation among critics for being absolutist. I covered some of those criticisms in my last post. I believe that an "X%-to-effective charities" standard reliably contributes to this perception, not because it is an accurate takeaway, but because it is what outsiders understand when they hear this in the context of our discussions with them. If we had the chance to explain in more detail, we could enlighten them. But we won't get that chance. For example, Nicholas Kristof is unlikely to read an email from me explaining this point and then publish an updated version of his original column.

By opening the explanation with a 2%/8% fuzzies/utilons pledge, it gives the person we are talking to a chance to see that we approve of their multiple loyalties and have an explicit community standard that lets them see how they can satisfy the competing demands of their moral parliament.

In turn, this aligns with what Lewis-Kraus calls "traditional liberal concerns." Of that portion of society that believes in charitable giving at all, the vast majority of it believes that there is hidden virtue in giving to the charities they currently support. Ideas of obligation, loyalty, insider knowledge, cosmopolitanism, liberalism, risk-taking, democracy, systemic change, beauty, religion, and many other values guide people's choices about charitable giving. If a 10% standard aligns with religious tithing, a 2%/8% split aligns better with traditional notions of liberalism and moderation.

I argue that EA is primarily trying to appeal not to religious donors, but to secular donors. As of 2019, EA was 86% agnostic/atheist/non-religious. Furthermore, a 10% religious tithe is typically supposed to be made to one's church. EA is not a church, and aligning with a 10% tithing obligation seems unlikely to be useful, because most of those who actually consider themselves under obligation to tithe will not consider donating to EA in the first place.

Thus, I believe that appealing to the cultural norms of the communities EA is trying to reach as donors is most important. And our critics most often criticize our donation standards as preventing them from donating to secular causes, such as alma maters, political movements, the arts, and so on. Showing them that there is a way to include these interests in their giving, while still saving lives in a way that can be demonstrated with cost-benefit analysis in the manner of Effective Altruism seems to be a promising strategy to me.

This leaves the issue of maintaining consistency. Clearly, a 2%/8% fuzzies/utilons pledge maintains some of the consistency. In fact, since the 2% portion is optional, all those currently donating 10% to EA charities could continue doing so with no disruption at all. If the 10% community standard is all that's preventing a subset of current pledgers from redirecting 20% of their annual giving to the opera instead of GiveWell, are we really pleased that the 10% community standard is having that effect?

I think the main concern is that shifting to a 2%/8% pledge might alienate more potential donors than it attracts - that there is some motivating and sustaining power in the way we currently structure discourse primarily around the idea of a 10% pledge to effective charities. As mhendric put it:

When I encountered EA, a pitch of "Donate X% to the most effective ways of improving lives, then spend an additional 2% on whatever you feel like" would have created more rather than less confusion in me.

I have no reason to doubt mhendric is describing their experience accurately. However, I think this then becomes a messaging problem to solve in cases like theirs. And for others, the 2%/8% pledge would be solving a messaging problem. Figuring out the right language and context to bring it up would be key, and one benefit of the 10% standard is that we have worked some of that out already. There would be switching costs to a new standard, perhaps substantial. This is one of the true downsides to changing our messaging and community standards. These costs include changing descriptions on our various websites, figuring out new ways to describe the 2%/8% pledge, and evaluating whether it is in fact as useful as I believe it would be in driving and sustaining donations.

The question is one of costs and benefits, as always. I cannot complete the cost-benefit analysis here. We need empirical data on how a broad segment of EAs and non-EAs would react to the idea of making such a change, when presented well. My goal for now is to continue addressing the conceptual questions and critiques raised by commenters here. At some point, I hope either to have them change my mind, or to change theirs and move from the realm of discussion and into the realm of a more substantial empirical investigation.

I thank all readers for their continued engagement and thoughts.

mhendric @ 2023-06-07T10:13 (+5)

I remain unconvinced by the suggestion that the benefits of the proposal would outweigh its costs.

Some thoughts, in no particular order

1. "So the 10% figure is not exactly arbitrary. It is chosen for a specific set of practical reasons - having brand recognition, being a nice round number, and being used by religious groups."

In the comment you refer to, I was arguing that you misunderstood criticisms that target the % of donation EA requires. Specifically, any % is arbitrary on normative grounds: if you have a duty of beneficence towards the global poor, it is unclear why it would discharge at 10%, 12%, 18%, 90% and so on. There are indeed practical reasons to choose 10% over others, but they do not solve the normative problem. Normatively, EA chooses an arbitrary number. Scott Alexander has a decent discussion of this point here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/19/nobody-is-perfect-everything-is-commensurable/

2. If the 10% community standard is all that's preventing a subset of current pledgers from redirecting 20% of their annual giving to the opera instead of GiveWell, are we really pleased that the 10% community standard is having that effect?"

I do not currently believe the amount of donors that you would sway by offering them the opportunity to donate X% to Givewell and Y% to other charities is large. Notably, this is already possible with the current pledge: you offer some sort of official badge of approval for the Y%.

3. And our critics most often criticize our donation standards as preventing them from donating to secular causes, such as alma maters, political movements, the arts, and so on. Showing them that there is a way to include these interests in their giving, while still saving lives in a way that can be demonstrated with cost-benefit analysis in the manner of Effective Altruism seems to be a promising strategy to me.

Somewhat more meta: I think you fundamentally misunderstand the nature of most criticism levied at the EA. I think most individuals are not criticizing that they won't be allowed to donate to anything else. Rather, they criticize that EA focuses on specific charities/careers/volunteering over others. For example, they disagree that a banker doing earning to give does more good than a social worker (an example that was central in your last post). Or they disagree that EA says Malaria is more efficient than e.g. the local political fundraiser because the latter provides benefits that are hard to quantify, yet huge. I take it to not be typical that someone thinks "EA is correct in their appraisal, yet I want to have their approval to donate 2% to something that is not effective". Your proposal is orthogonal to the concerns of critics of EA: you offer them approval to donate to a cause that is explicitly second-rate in the ranking of donations of the pledge. You also don't offer a reason for EA to believe these donations will do most good outside of EA being able to trick more people into doing a pledge, or the public looking more favorably upon us. This strikes me as a transparent move that will likely backfire significantly. 

I'm happy to continue this conversation, but I think a more direct conversation may be more productive than continuing via Forum-Post & Comments. If you want to schedule a zoom call, please reach out!

DirectedEvolution @ 2023-06-07T15:54 (+3)

Hi mhendric,

Thanks for your feedback! Researching and writing up my posts takes enough time that adding in individual zoom calls on top would be tough - I work full time. Maybe at some point?

I see two strains of EA criticism. The one you point out comes from EA’s ideological opponents. That doesn’t mean they are bad, wrong, or that their lives revolve around some sort of other political activism. It means that they have decided on a different organizing ideology for their worldview that generates conclusions incompatible with EA’s way of looking at a variety of questions.

I don’t think it’s productive to try and persuade this group of people.

By contrast, I think a large number of people who are potential donors exist who can basically get behind EA ideas, but who would raise concerns along the lines that the 2%/8% pledge idea is meant to address. Here, the barrier isn’t an organized ideology incompatible with EA. It’s the way we organize our conversations with the public and the background perceptions that people have of EA before they encounter our people, books, websites and donation platforms, and before they’ve put more than a few seconds of thought into our ideas.

The reason I am carrying out this series of posts is partly because I think my proposal is genuinely useful and something we should be experimenting with. But it’s also because I think EA can benefit from kicking the tires of its central ideas. It helps us maintain a culture of open-mindedness, and it also exposes where an apparent community consensus and cogent framing of an issue in fact needs work. I continue to think this is the case in this area.

DirectedEvolution @ 2023-06-07T06:12 (+5)

I continue to find the speed at which these posts accrue initial at least one initial early strong-downvote surprising and frustrating. Once again, I invite downvoters to articulate their disagreement in a comment. Based on analytics, I know it is one of the first 6 readers, and that they spent less than 5 minutes on this 11 minute article. I precommit to responding with a "thanks for your feedback" or something more positive and thoughtful than that.

Jason @ 2023-06-10T02:50 (+2)

I don't think "you should donate to charity, and at least 10% to effective charities" is a more difficult message to convey than "you should donate at least 10% to charity, and at least 8% of that 10% to effective charities." 

To the extent "you should only donate to effective charities" is being conveyed in practice, it's not clear to me why deploying a 2/8 message is the most effective way to correct that mismessaging. It seems you could get much of the value you're seeking by explaining that many (probably most?) people choose to give to causes that are meaningful to them above and beyond the pledge.

And I do think the costs of a 2/8 message would be substantial. The 10% community standard is implicitly making some sort of moral claim. I struggle to come up with a rationale that gives someone the green checkmark of moral approval for giving 8% to effective causes + 2% for music for predominately rich people (i.e., opera) but denies the checkmark for just the 8% to effective causes. In my view, the idea that one can partially satisfy the moral claim implied by the community standard by donating to music for rich people substantially weakens the claim.

As you imply, the 10% figure is morally arbitrary -- but at least it has some cultural grounding[1] and is a nice round number. Adding in a 2/8 split adds a second arbitrariness -- and one that lacks any clear cultural grounding or status as a nice round number. Why not 3/7? or, more likely given the desire for round numbers, 5/5?

  1. ^

    The grounding is not based in an appeal for religious donors to replace their religious tithe with a secular one. Rather, using a percentage that was culturally salient reduces the impression that we pulled the 10% number out of thin air. Even to those who are not religious, there's a decent chance they would recognize the figure as a traditional aspiration for charity.

DirectedEvolution @ 2023-06-10T06:02 (+4)

In fact, ignoring concerns about message complexity and not trying to be too fancy, I might suggest we eliminate any hard percentage standard in favor of a recommended % donation that scales with income. So somebody earning < $10,000-$20,000/year might be advised not to donate. Someone earning $80,000 might be asked to donate 10%. Someone earning $10,000,000/year might be asked to donate 90%. These are just rough numbers. But I think this might be better treated in book form or in tailored appeals to individual people. In the EA community I think it would be nice if we often discussed specific ways we could refine and tailor this community standard in a way that's optimized for "it's easy to understand how this number was computed yet it makes sense for me" rather than being optimized for compatibility with a sound bite in a media appearance.

Jason @ 2023-06-17T03:51 (+2)

That would be more accurate, but doing it well would start to feel like a tax return. But going on income alone without considering cost of living, debt obligations, family size, etc. would produce inaccurate results. 

Maybe it could be a range -- e.g., We recommend the average person earning $80K a year donate 11%; for most people at this income we would recommend donating somewhere between 8-14% depending on personal circumstances. (I changed 10 percent from your example to 11 percent as a starting point, because I think the median person would assign themselves a slightly-less-than-median point in the range.) 

DirectedEvolution @ 2023-06-10T05:40 (+2)

Hi Jason, thank you for your response.

To the extent "you should only donate to effective charities" is being conveyed in practice, it's not clear to me why deploying a 2/8 message is the most effective way to correct that mismessaging.

It's certainly not the most effective way in all circumstances. I think that, on a substantial the margin, a 2/8 message would be more effective in many circumstances. I think a sophistated EA take would be that the real goal is to find a substantial yet isustainable level of giving to effective causes, one that is tailored to the individual's material situation and the constituency of their moral parliament.

For people who haven't encountered this complex bundle of ideas and aren't going to give us a huge amount of time before writing us off, a 2/8 message gestures at subtlety of thought, implying moral parliamentarian ideas, the idea of distinguishing effective causes from personal passions, the idea of a substantial habit of charitable giving.

A 10% message hits the latter two points, but implies that we're trying to frame the personal passions of the target of our giving appeal as unworthy targets of charitable giving. This is indeed the direct implication of the idea that altruistic efficiency follows a power law distribution - ineffective charities are massively worse than the best, and we lose huge value on the margin when we direct funds and energies to suboptimal causes.

But this totalizing view is one of the major reasons why even people who see the sense of cost-benefit calculations resist thinking in this manner. The implications are profoundly destabilizing if you don't moderate them. So we moderate them. But when you get hit with that realization that there's a whole community of people whom you haven't met, who think in terms of cost/benefit altruistic calculations, and that the straight-line calculation is that you ought to give everything to a narrow band of super-effective causes and live on the level of the global poor, that borks the brain and causes people distance themselves.

A 10% standard addresses many of those concerns and is much better than the straight-line calculation by protecting people from utilitarian ravages and promoting movement growth. But its limit is that it seems to imply that symbolically, every other area in life is valueless and that our aim is to reduce the amount of non-EA charitable giving you engage in to zero. This is a bad argument but one that people reliably seem to come up with, because people aren't all mathematically literate or careful reasoners the first time they encounter an idea. A 2/8 message addresses this specific way that the thought process and conversation can go wrong by saying: "Yes, your passion causes are valuable and we do approve of them, and you can keep giving to them, and that is a positive thing that you do. We are also asking you to recognize the sheer magnitude of clear, unambiguous good you can do by donating to things like X-risk prevention or malaria bednets and to really step up your donating in order to support these causes." Putting hard numbers on it gives people a sense of the proportions we might consider appropriate as a community standard, which is why "2%/8%" and not just the qualitative description is a necessary part of the message, just as "10%" is necessary rather than "a very substantial level of giving."

I struggle to come up with a rationale that gives someone the green checkmark of moral approval for giving 8% to effective causes + 2% for music for predominately rich people (i.e., opera) but denies the checkmark for just the 8% to effective causes.

I originally meant to include a metaphor that I think is a helpful reframing of the idea of a community standard/line in the sand/Schelling point, but apparently I never worked it into the main post.

I think of a community standard not as a rigid number that's a pass/fail, but an elastic tether. We have anchored it at 10%. Obviously, for a solid earner in a country like the USA, being at 9% is a little worse, 11% a little better, but we don't encourage you to "stretch the standard" all the way up to 50% (because it can set an intimidating or extremely demanding-sounding image of what our standard is and provoke a sense of being not good enough in ways that are bad for community growth) or all the way down to 0%. But a little variability around 10% really doesn't matter much. The idea of the "elastic" standard is that it resists further deformation the further you try and move away from it. Having elasticity built into the standard makes it a better standard because it emphasizes the ways our community embraces flexibility and personal fit whlie still having actual, meaningful standards.

So yeah, full agree, no "green checkmark" mentality. More like a "green tether" or something like that.

Jason @ 2023-06-17T03:41 (+2)

I think you've hit on one of the challenging bits here -- what the 10% represents is not particularly well defined, certainly not to someone just encountering EA ideas. We can approximate the intent with metaphors or phrases like "community standard," "some sort of moral claim," "green tether," etc. But if we're assuming a target audience who hasn't "encountered this complex bundle of ideas and aren't going to give us a huge amount of time before writing us off," then we can't assume any kind of nuanced understanding of what the pledge represents. 

If I understand the perceived problem you're trying to fix correctly, the theory is that at least a meaningful fraction of the target audience is going to misinterpret the community standard as somehow precluding or discouraging less-effective donations out of the 90% -- even though this is a pretty unreasonable interpretation to start with, [1] and can be disclaimed pretty early in a presentation.

To me, a more plausible inference would be to read the standard as embodying a claim that following the standard is morally obligatory -- or at least significantly morally superior -- to not following it, at least for a median-income adult in a developed country with no special circumstances.[2] And if the listener comes in with that inference, the 2/8 standard seems much harder to justify as a philosophical matter than the 10% standard. And that seems like a significant downside to me, given that EA has had more success with philosophically-minded people.

In the end, some of what we're discussing touches on empirical questions that Giving What We Can might find worth evaluating. When presented with brief information about the GWWC pledge, what beliefs about the community standard do people endorse? How do various ways of explaining the community standard effect the listener's understanding? That's not about trying to manipulate people; it is seeing if the way things are being communicated faithfully conveys the community's beliefs. If we are unsuccessful in tweaking the presentation to dispel the incorrect idea that less-effective donations are discouraged through messaging tweaks, how do more substantial reforms (like a 2/8 standard) perform in accuracy?

  1. ^

    The community standard doesn't say anything about what to do with the other 90%, and a standard that was totally fine with the pledger buying Taylor Swift tickets but objected to donating the same money to a local animal shelter instead would be  . . . bizarre. 

  2. ^

    I think most people would intuitively grasp the implications of partial compliance: the median-income adult meeting 80% of the standard is acting in a morally superior to an adult in the same circumstances meeting 60% of it, and so on.