If you have a high discount rate (which seems reasonable if you're giving to certain charities) and are altruistic, maybe you should be a bit shortsighted as well.

As a white male, my official life expectancy is 76 years. Let's say that there was some behavior I could engage in that would increase my productivity now but would decrease my life expectancy to 71 years. What is the present value of those five years? Here are my calculations (they shouldn't necessarily be trusted).

We'll assume a 10 percent discount rate. The present value of the five years of life from 71 to 76 in the year when I'm 71 is (1 / 0.1) * (1 - 1 / (1 + 0.1)^5) = 3.79 years. I'm 23, so the present value today of 3.79 years when I'm 71 is 3.79/(1.1^(71 - 23)) = 0.039 years, or two weeks.

So if a 10 percent discount rate is reasonable, and if the value of each year of life is constant, and if I'm perfectly altruistic, I should be indifferent to an extra two weeks of productivity now and an extra five years of productivity at the end of my life.

Is this correct?

A couple of decisions to which this sort of reasoning might apply:

* Choosing a high-stress career. Your life expectancy would be reduced, and you might have to retire early, but it could be worth it.
* Using nicotine gum or lozenges as a stimulant. This would increase your productivity now, but would increase your risk for cardiovascular disease later in life.

Can you think of any others?

Your (old) argument seems correct pat http://www.80000hours.org/blog/43-the-haste-consideration

It's true that my argument is nothing new. But it seems that many people (including me) have not yet grasped all its implications.

Most people in the EA movement are neither totally altruistic nor totally egoistic. They want to donate their money and time, but not all of it. Some choose less enjoyable careers, but few choose careers they dislike, even if these would be the best from an impartial standpoint.

If semi-altruists did accept this argument, it seems that they would front-load their donations and working hours. Working 50-hour weeks over the next decade would enable them to work 30-hour weeks for the next three decades and still do as much good as someone who worked 40-hour weeks over all four decades. I imagine that most people would prefer the first option to the second. I would.

(That's a rough approximation; it's based on a twenty-three year-old who will retire at age sixty-six and whose wages will grow at 3 percent a year, with a 10 percent discount rate. It doesn't account for some important factors, and some of the math might be wrong, but something like this must be true if we're using a high discount rate.)

Would you rather watch one film now or a hundred films in fifty years? Would you rather have a two-week vacation now or retire a couple of years early? These are the sorts of choices that semi-altruists face.

It seems that most of them believe something like, "I care about others, but I care more about myself and those around me. I want to do good, but not to be an extremist about it. So I'll donate X percent of my income every year till I retire." But it would make more sense for them to donate 2X percent of their income for ten years and nothing afterward (or something like that). But I've never heard of anybody pursuing this strategy.

To me, this suggests they haven't heard the argument, they reject it, or they don't appreciate its implications.

Am I correct in assuming that the reason for a high discount rate is the assumption that the best charities can use resources far more efficiently now than these resources could be used in a few years? How hard is the case for this assumption? Is it really 10% p.a.?

Would you rather watch one film now or a hundred films in fifty years?

This seems a rather different question, unless you also assume that my brain will change so that future films give me only 1/100 of the pleasure a current film would give me, or maybe that films become obsolete and are replaced by something better. Or is this an expression of the probabilitiy of Black Swans or mortality? I thought that was included in the life expectancy metric.

I've heard (very anecdotally) that it may be 20%. Then again fundraising can have a 400% rate of return or more!

Ruairi wrote:I've heard (very anecdotally) that it may be 20%. Then again fundraising can have a 400% rate of return or more!

Is this about that idea that your inspiration will inspire people who will inspire people who will inspire people? Because I'm really not sure that thing works as well as the story goes. I think there's an intuitively selfish core to most people and evangelism goes only so far.

I'd be more convinced if a charity needed more initial funding to survive, and no other charity on the planet does quite what it does. But then the room for funding can't be that high (compared to the Gates foundation or whatever).

Or is the idea that there's a crucial window of time, and everything needs to happen very fast before it's too late? The SIAI could do such a sales pitch w/regards to FAI, but of course that thing stands and falls with the credibility of the hypothesis and the alleged competence to turn more funding into probability shifts of a desired sort.

Both I guess, if you're fundraising with money does the hypothesis seem more plausible?

It seems important to spread concern for RWAS before humans spread life, simulate life, etc, at which point the job will probably be a lot harder.

Ruairi wrote:It seems important to spread concern for RWAS before humans spread life, simulate life, etc, at which point the job will probably be a lot harder.

Yes, RWAS could be one of the concerns where a charity needs more initial funding "and no other charity on the planet does quite what it does". But I'm not sure if "there's a crucial window of time, and everything needs to happen very fast before it's too late".

If the RWAS charity survives and has basic functionality, can it really use money 10% more effectively than it could next year?

If you're doing something like fundraising which has compounding returns I imagine so, yes

Btw Pat thank you very much for posting this! Maybe 80k could make it into a blog post? I think this is a hugely important issue!

The only counter consideration I can think of is that you might want to try and live until a singularity or something happens so you can influence that or your wisdom may increase as you get older and you might donate/work for better things !

Am I correct in assuming that the reason for a high discount rate is the assumption that the best charities can use resources far more efficiently now than these resources could be used in a few years? How hard is the case for this assumption? Is it really 10% p.a.?

I have no idea what it is. I heard the same 20 percent figure that Ruairi did, probably from the same person, in reference to a specific organization. Leaving aside the conflict of interest of the person quoting the figure, it seems unlikely that you could sustain a rate of return that high for very long. Even 10 percent might be unlikely over the long term. It seems that you should discount at least at the rate of return on risky financial investments after taxes and expenses, which most prognosticators reckon will not exceed 5 percent or so a year.

Surveying people at various charities about discount rates could produce some useful data, even though there might be a bias toward higher discount rates. You could ask questions like, "You can receive either a donation for $10,000 in a year [to reduce the hyperbolic discounting that might be caused by using now as an option] or a larger donation in 11 years. How large would the latter donation have to be for you to prefer it?" By asking such questions, we would at least have a more diverse set of guesses that might be more based in reality than our armchair speculations.

Would you rather watch one film now or a hundred films in fifty years?

This seems a rather different question, unless you also assume that my brain will change so that future films give me only 1/100 of the pleasure a current film would give me, or maybe that films become obsolete and are replaced by something better.

I was assuming that you could either watch movies or work and donate the money you earn, whose value would be discounted steeply. You could (a) work the length of a film now and donate $X, allowing you to instead watch many movies in 50 years, or (b) watch a movie now and make up for it by working a lot fifty years from now.

If we are talking about the present value of money, then I would get the same answer that you do. I did it this way assuming the present value of $1 given a 10% interest rate (without quibbling over whether we count the final year at the start or end of the year):

1/(1.10)^(76-23) = 0.006400114 (for one year)

To check it, you can multiply 0.006400114 by the 10% interest rate (76-23) times, which is to multiply it by 1.1^(76- 23):

0.006400114 * (1.1)^(76-23) = 1 (with some possible rounding error)

For all 5 years, it would be about:
1/(1.10)^(76-23) + 1/(1.10)^(75-23) + 1/(1.10)^(74-23) + 1/(1.10)^(73-23) + 1/(1.10)^(72-23) = 0.03907333


... *BUT* your final conclusion would hold only if money can be equated to "goodness" and life or "utility" can be discounted using equations borrowed from finance.

Perhaps the altruistic person would use the money to save the lives of people who would otherwise starve to death. Maybe 1,000 people are saved, and they multiply to produce 2,000 people, all of whom die when you stop sending money to keep them alive (or they die when there is an economic crisis in the donor country and donations fall--or due to all the helpful donotions from other countries, population density in the poor villiage hits a critical point and a civil war starts--or a thousand other unknowns). What if the money is used to provide birth control? Maybe you prevent 1,000 unwanted births over the years and, because they don't have children, you prevent 2,000 people from being born into a place that cannot sustain life. There are also many alternatives, including (a) living simply and not monkeying around with other people's lives or (b) living like a complete glutton and spending lots of money on frivolous toys. It would be difficult for me to say that the person who saves 1,000 lives now so that 2,000 can starve to death in the future is doinging anything better than the glutton who spends lots of money on frivolous toys. I'm not trying to disuade people from seeking to be a good person by helping others, but I am noting that the ability to measure utility lacks an objective basis of measurement and thereby represents a threat to the validity of any claims about the value of actively interceding in the lives of others.

Here is another alternative to calculate (this is a work in progress): what would be the utility value of living simply, minimizing negative impact on others to the best of your ability (including minimizing your impact on future generations), not "helping" others through altruism (perhaps with exceptions for unpredictable emergencies or immediate family), and perhaps encouraging others to do the same. How would you calculate the relative value of that versus the other things? This would be a variation of negative utilitarianism which might sound stingy, but "minimizing negative impact on others" can be quite difficult and far-reaching (it can be extended to treatment of animals and nature, opposition to government coercion of redistribution of wealth, noninterventionist foreign policy except perhaps in extreme situations, and many other things).

The basis for negative utilitarianism is that the value of avoiding harm seems (to me) to be more grounded in a measure of value that can be observed in human and nonhuman behavior than is the net value of certain exchanges between two goods or between one harm (e.g., personal sacrifice or forcing people to pay for social welfare programs) and a good (e.g., giving money to others). It is the exchange of unlike utility that represents the heart of the measurement problem in utiltiiarianism. I am typically more confident that avoiding the harm of a person (or animal or maybe even plants) is "good" than I am that saving lives in a foreign country (for example) is good because the long term consequences of saving those lives is difficult or impossible to even identify not to mention the difficulty of measuring it and comparing it to the value of some inherently dissimilar exchange value. In some cases, I would choose the altruistic case because of my emotional disposition (regardless of my philosophy), and in some cases I would endorse active altruism (as I have done many times). For example, I would save a kid drowning in the puddle even if my shoes were ruined, and I sometimes dedicate resources to helping the needy despite avoiding it at other times. I am less confident that planning to help every needy person is a worthy cause, and I would opposing stealing from one person to give to another (in all realistic situations) because I expect that such stealing will cause harm, and I lack a rational basis for saying that the "good" generated by giving the money to somebody else exceeds the value of that harm or otherwise "undoes" that harm.

Ruairi wrote:Btw Pat thank you very much for posting this! Maybe 80k could make it into a blog post? I think this is a hugely important issue!

As RyanCarey mentioned, they sort of did already. But more could be said about this issue. The idea of front-loading one's altruistic contributions is interesting, and I wonder whether advocating that people do this would be a good strategy.

The only counter consideration I can think of is that you might want to try and live until a singularity or something happens so you can influence that or your wisdom may increase as you get older and you might donate/work for better things !

Yes, it's hard to shoehorn these considerations into a discount rate.

Rehoot: It seems unlikely to me that trying to minimize your influence would be a better strategy than trying to maximize your positive influence. It sounds like status-quo bias to me, but we probably have a bunch of different assumptions.

Thanks, Pat!

Recklessness of this type is valid within the model. You don't even need internal rates of return on charity to see it; you can get it just from financial rates of return.

However, I'm not sure that it makes a big difference in practice unless we come up with a good example. As far as the ones Pat listed in the opening post:

• I think the overriding risk of a high-stress job is that you'll become burned out and come to reset altruism or end up less functional than you were before. These jobs might indeed take a year or three off your life expectancy, but I don't think this was ever the first concern concern considering the amount of money at stake.
• I'm also cautiously skeptical about stimulants. I haven't read the research in great depth, but my understanding is that many stimulants don't have long-term benefits: They just concentrate stimulation at some times to the expense of other times.

One example where recklessness may be appropriate is with saving for retirement, although this isn't just due to discounting. From my "Tips on personal finance":

it seems like there's a decent risk (>20%?) that the financial system as we know it will have changed radically within 40 years. [...] And even if you think you'd rather invest than donate now, you might change your mind; but once money is in a 401(k), it's hard/expensive to retrieve. Finally, I'm not so worried about having savings to support myself, because by the time I'm no longer able to work, either I'll continue to be providing utilitarian value, in which case someone might fund me, or else I won't be providing value, in which case it doesn't really matter what happens.

Inspired by this topic, I wrote a new article: "The haste consideration, revisited." I originally was going to write it in this reply, but it got rather long.

Ruairi mentions the idea of ~400% returns from charity fundraising, and I used to be puzzled why more people weren't jumping on this opportunity. It makes more sense in view of logistic growth: Eventually you'll max out your donor base, and doing so sooner amounts to just shifting the logistic curve left. The growth isn't forever. That said, getting high donations sooner can still be valuable, and when you get more now, you can promote the cause more and increase the limited number of possible donors. But this is still far from actually having a 400% annual return indefinitely. I'm still confused as to exactly how to value these returns, but I'm less confused than I was before.