Persistent Idealism

"What is probably not wise is trying to lock your future self in with precommitments."

The outside view suggests that as I get older I will probably get less idealistic and less altruistic. For example, from something I happened to be reading this morning:

Bob’s lack of ambition, which had initially seemed so noble, began to irritate Jacqui. “Everybody else in the animal-rights movement was growing up, starting to settle down, moving out of the squats and all that,” she recalled. “He was already a lot older, and he was not progressing.” While Bob was in the pub, plotting direct actions, Jacqui was at home, worrying about money.

(In this case Bob hasn't "grown up" because he's actually a government spy assigned to the animal rights movement, but if anything that makes this stronger.)

I expect that morally I will still believe that we should be helping others, I just will be pulled more and more to spend money on myself and people around me. Commitment here isn't to lock myself into the values of a much younger self so much as keep myself doing what I have all along thought was the right thing to do.

So I spoke about this specifically with a lesswronger parent tonight. He says that he feels like the weightings on his original utility terms have not been changed much, rather that he discovered a new term that is fairly large.

Discovered, or added?

How about practicing nonconformism as a skill so you're comfortable being frugal even with spendy friends?

"instead decide from the outset on a level of self-indulgence that you are likely to be able to keep up."

For example, by setting a percentage to donate.

Schelling fence idea is interesting. However, as you indicated, I think that if it is too restrictive, your future, morally-compromised self is likely to abandon it. If you can outsource the enforcement, then maybe you’ve got a chance, but will banks fund a charitable trust with money you don’t have yet? Maybe you could take out a huge loan today and give the proceeds to charity, forcing your future self to pay it down. Of course, access to capital, cost of borrowing, and income growth rates need to be considered.

Or perhaps a less intense alternative would work: set up a relatively small, pre-scheduled, automatic bank draft to charity before you are corrupted. If the committed amount is more than you would have contributed otherwise, yet small enough to avoid being cancelled by your future self due to the “default effect”, then you’ve made progress.

If you were an activist, then you'd at least have been an activist for a few years.

You assume that by being an activist you're automatically doing something useful. That's not self-evident to me.

"If you decide to go to college so you can make more money, and then once you graduate you backslide, you never help anyone."

This makes a lot of sense for people who wouldn't be starting earning to give right away, but I usually see the 'backsliding' argument applied to people already earning to give or considering whether that's what they should do next.

If you decide to go to college so you can make more money, and then once you graduate you backslide, you never help anyone.

In a healthy system, incentives are roughly aligned for individuals and the group, and you get money because other people wanted to trade with you out of their own self-interest. Crudely, more money means more people thought it would benefit them to trade with you. There are diseased fields with net negative social balance (e.g. selling meth), but EA types probably wont' stray into these areas anyway.

"'avoid your coworkers' might be bad advice for an aspiring philanthropist."

I don't think you should avoid your coworkers. That's definitely bad advice. Not only are there the potential advantages you describe, they're probably really interesting people! I'm saying you should try to have a lot of different influences, and not let your coworkers form too much of your social circle.

(Which is also a good strategy given that you may may lose your job, and don't want to lose all your friends with it.)

The reason to make lots of money to give it away is elaborated on here, in the paragraph about the lawyer who wants to clean up the beach.

Summary version: More charities are funding-limited than volunteer-limited, and if you are making a sufficient amount of money, working one extra hour and donating the proceeds from that hour gets more done, saves more people, than using that hour to volunteer. The important part is to actually save people.

Saving people is far more important than giving consistently (If the best way to save people is to give each month, I want to give each month, if the best way to save people is to donate large chunks infrequently, I want to donate large chunks infrequently), saving people is far more important than having a good attitude towards giving (If having a good attitude towards giving makes me donate more, I want to have a good attitude towards giving, if having a selfish attitude towards giving makes me donate more, I want to have a selfish attitude), and saving people is far more important than spiritually developing in the process (I trust you can complete the pattern). I'm not saying these things are bad, it's just that they are subgoals of the thing you are trying to accomplish, which is doing the most good. Making a great deal to give it away, and making sure you don't backslide into selfishness are things to do to ensure that the most people can be saved. Regular giving is secondary in importance.

The goal is not fitting conventional patterns of giving, the goal is to help as many people as possible. To try to get a high score in the LIVES IMPROVED statistics column of the game of life. If something helps in this quest, do it, if it doesn't help, stop doing it.

50% donations
23% taxes
21% saving
 6%  spending

"working at vampire squid headquarters..."

Earning to give doesn't require working for companies that are actively evil with secret malicious blow-the-whistle-on plans, and I don't think working for such organizations would be a good idea. But if you're working in tech (ex: me) or finance (ex: Jason Trigg) you can still fit in fine with your coworkers. You don't "ooze righteousness" or anything. (And I think trying to avoid coming off as "holier than thou" is very important if we don't want effective altruism to appear arrogant and offputting.)

"you can almost certainly do much more net good by going into engineering, medicine or similar and working very hard at perfecting something which has broad use"

You're making pretty strong claims ("outperform any plausible amount of giving") but the only evidence you're giving seems to be the claim that "in any given job, far more resources will pass through your hands than will be diverted into your bank account". Each individual doesn't have that much control over resources passing through their hands, while they have a lot of control over what they do with money they earn and can donate. But let's look at an example.

As the tech lead for the pagespeed module I'm one of ~10 people working on open source web server software that speeds up ~0.5% of internet page views by ~0.1s. There are about 1M page views per second on the internet, so every second we save people about 500s, or 500 person-years of time every year. That's 50-years per team member, so you could say through my work I save one life a year. Now for this work I get paid enough enough that I can donate about $100k/year. Donations to the AMF save a life for ~$2.5k but let's say $5k to be safe. So that's 20 lives. This is rough, but in my case at least my donations are going about 20x farther than my work. Add in replaceability and that shifts the balance even further in favor of donations.