I want to save myself

Apparently you aren't signed up for cryonics. You should be; flying your near-corpse in ice to the US (or maybe Russia) is strictly better than letting it rot. Not sure how life insurance interacts with a cancer diagnosis.

Give to whichever charity you estimate is best. Your donations are always too small to affect which helps most at the margin.

I give 5% of my income, which will go to 10% once I reach financial security (defined as holding a job for six months and lack of terrifying immediate prospects). That's "all money going in", not just taxable income. If I acquire money illegitimately (finding it with no obvious owner, borrowing it and the lender not wanting it back), it all goes to charity. I try to be frugal, save for investments (nice shoes help get raises), but fail miserably. I donate once a year, for practical reasons.

Selfish motives are fine, but that's probably a typical psyche fallacy. A whole lot of people defend causes at great personal cost.

How do you determine the time- and risk- tradeoffs between things like saving money for healthcare, and investing money in preventing an unfriendly AI FOOM?

Yes, I would like to see this being outlined as well.

This question must be especially fascinating if you are Eliezer Yudkowsky, in which case the answers to questions about your own survival and the future of humanity converge. Does he constantly wear a helmet? Since falling from the couch and hitting his head could impede a galactic civilisation...

I sometimes get questioned on why I don't drink, but my response of "I don't dare lose a single brain cell" [...] is usually accepted with a smile.

-- Eliezer Yudkowsky

PS: I am sorry to hear of your cancer diagnosis. I hope you get well!

Somewhat related: http://lesswrong.com/lw/4ga/lw_was_started_to_help_altruists/ (mostly the comments).

If you have cancer and actually want to save yourself (rather than giving the appearance of wanting to save yourself, as all too many do), I would recommend buying and studying Cancer: Nutrition And Survival or The Cancer Breakthrough from http://www.lulu.com/ascorbate .

These may look like quackery to the casual observer, but the co-author, Dr Steve Hickey is very far from a quack. He is a relative of mine, and so I may be biased, but that means I can tell you that he is the single most intelligent human being I have ever had any contact with.

His doctorate is in medical biophysics, but it's from working with him (I proofread, fact-checked and helped research his books) that I first learned about Bayes' theorem, Solomonoff induction, and most of the other tools of advanced rationality. Unlike most people working in the medical sciences, he can actually think.

I have observed people with cancer who have read his books and followed his advice, and I have observed people with cancer who either haven't read these books or haven't followed the advice. In my experience the main difference between the two groups is that the former group are alive.

(I get no financial benefit whatsoever from these books, and any benefit to my uncle from a single sale is on the order of a latte from Starbucks. This is meant as as dispassionate a piece of advice as I can give.)

Why do you prefer to contribute (in part) towards humankind-wide X-risk problems rather than more narrow but personally important issues?

As I've mentioned before, I consider my donations to existential risk to be a subtractive process brought on by depression. I care very little for my own life, but that lack of caring seems to enable actions which are selfless. On the other hand, it also tends to cause wild swings in spending. The easier it is for me to do, the quicker it gets over my action-threshold and becomes reality. Clicking a button on a website to donate a bunch of money is very easy. Much easier than going to the store. Setting up a recurring transaction with one button click which then translates to thousands of dollars over months or years is easier still. This mindset becomes dangerous when something shiny but low-utility catches my attention, like "style and fashion" or "expert wine tasting".

How do you determine the time- and risk- tradeoffs between things like saving money for healthcare, and investing money in preventing an unfriendly AI FOOM?

I use my internal Bayesometer after hundreds of hours of immersion in a topic. I do a quick mental check, "How do I feel about X?" and it spits out a response. From the results, it appears less biased in general than most of the methods used by other people, especially with regards to its self-reported confidence levels. This community may have more rigorous methods, but they're likely much more difficult to apply, and therefore unlikely to pass my action-threshold. Sitting and reading websites and books and research papers requires virtually zero action by my count.

How do you decide what portion of income to donate to SIAI, which to SENS, and which to keep as money for purely personal problems that others won't invest in?

I perform a quick and easy computation to see how much to donate to SIAI: how much money do I have in my bank account? It's typically a lot (more than 23% of my gross income last year), since I have a very low cost of living lifestyle and a good job. I donated a pittance to SENS so I could get the free book they were offering at the time. Personal problems get the minimal amount to keep me comfortable. I've often thought that if I got cancer with low odds of survival, I'd want to donate as much as I can, including all of my savings, to get it out of my hands. Stupid doctors take way too much of our money for a terrible return in QALY at the end. I've also thought about naming a charity as my beneficiary in a will or just on my savings accounts. Working on legal documents takes a lot of effort though.

In case the health treat is not trivially treatable you might read up on the science about the specific type of cancer you got. There are a few percentage points to be gained by knowing the important factors that you can actually influence for your treatment results.

It is also a good time to form a strong opinion on cryogenics. (disclaimer, I did not do so myself yet, and might actually decide against it. But people I respect are all in)

I currently do not donate to any causes due to a lack of income. I volunteer my time in one area, which I am involved in for more than 10 years. But I do not do so because I wholeheartedly support the cause, it is just a very convenient place to try things out and a lot of fun.

In donating one usually does not give out too much of the income. Figures like 10% get used, and do not hurt the donor. When picking charities there are some services that explore how efficient a charity works. (And rationally one should choose the best and give only to that. But often one wants to give to some local causes, and also some non-locals). I would not give more than a charity can safely handle.

Friends of mine have small foundations that run on 2000€. There is no point in donating a big chunk, but I might add another 500 at some point.

I don't do selfishness. Partially this is because I don't believe in personal identity, partially because I feel like there's no fundamental difference between me and anyone else, and partially because it doesn't make sense to me intuitively. As such, I try to help myself as much as is necessary to help people in general. Anything more is akrasia.

You generally should donate all of your money to one cause. If you're "donating to yourself", there's significantly diminishing returns, so you'd figure out how much you value the two comparatively, and figure out at what point the marginal cost of your happiness is equal to the value of the best charity.

Incidentally, this works out as having a certain amount of money you keep, and then everything beyond that you donate, regardless of how much you actually make. As such, if you're Bill Gates, you'd donate virtually all your money to charity.

I believe my values are well aligned with those of the LW community; wanting to Save The World is a good applause light but I believe most people want to do so for selfish reasons.

Yeah. My initial motivation was mostly having me and friends/family being able to be around for a while.

My values have since drifted to become more altruistic ("Well, even if hypothetically me, everyone I'll ever meet and like, and enough people to keep the economy running will be able to live, I might as well try to save other people because it's not like I'm really doing anything better").

I would also like to ask LW members: why do you prefer to contribute (in part) towards humankind-wide X-risk problems rather than more narrow but personally important issues?

Because I don't want to outlive everyone that I love.

Also yeah, cryonics. Good luck.