All Thoughts Being Equal

I've informally decided to allocate roughly ten percent of my gross annual earnings to donations, in the spirit of Effective Altruism and the "Giving What We Can" pledge. As public reporting of contributions is rather in line with the EA philosophy, I'm keeping a record of what I've done. Maybe it will inspire people to imitate or critique my donation choices! I donated a total of $500 in December 2015. This year, since I didn't earn a lot of money, was mostly about starting to give , and establishing a baseline from which I can iterate and move towards a more satisfactory and effective contribution portfolio. So in future, I suspect that my contributions to, say the "De Facto Subscription" category will stay flat while donations to actual charities will increase. You might ask: why are you publishing this? The answer is: Other people have. Also, why should charity be secret ? Humanities Donations: 5% In 2015, I donated $25 to...

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, pediatrician and philanthropist Priscilla Chan, pledged to donate 99% of their wealth (over their lifetimes) to a philanthropic LLC they're setting up, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. There was some rather vitriolic criticism of this endeavor, which seems both somewhat predictable-in-hindsight but also rather strange at first blush. Do the criticisms have merit? What about the "debunking"? As you might expect, I think there's something missing here. I. As philosopher and Effective Altruism guru William McAskill (whose book Doing Good Better I read and reviewed ) noted : “Couple decides to give majority of their earnings to charity” is hardly a headline that you’d expect people to take umbrage at. But when you replace “couple” with “Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan,” suddenly everyone goes crazy. Even though the majority of commentators have been positive, a significant proportion of people have reacted with a...