Giving What We Can

And they're like, if we took this seriously, we should be thinking about how much money can I afford to give up, right? Because that's really what Peter Singer is telling us to do is like, hey, if you have expendable income or even some income that would be nice for you to have, you should be giving until it hurts.

So like, okay, how can we give until it hurts and where should we give? And they found an organization called Giving What We Can.

And the general move here is not just to extend that singer argument, but it's to actually be a lot more careful about the nature of the charities that we give to.

It's not just, hey, I have $200 more than I need this month, so I should give it away.

Another site that's relevant here.

So there's a bunch of organizations here.

There's the Giving What We Can.

There's GiveWell.org, which is, as far as I know, I haven't been on that site in a long time.

Effective altruism has high-end roots, going back to Australian philosopher Peter Singer, professor of evidence at Princeton University, and McCaskill and Toby Ord, both former University of Oxford scholars.

These three have founded a number of connected nonprofits, such as Giving What We Can and Founders Pledge.

All eager, trigger warning, to redistribute wealth.

And there's serious wealth here.

Earn money and give it away to the recommended charities.

I then took something called the Giving What We Can Pledge, which is a mainstay of the effective altruism movement.

It's a lifelong commitment to giving away at least a tenth of your income to highly effective charities, an idea rooted in the work of philosopher Peter Singer.

And one of its earliest signatories, none other than Dario Amadei, now the boss of Anthropic.

For me, journalists are here to hold power to account.

That now includes effective altruists.

So recently I asked Giving What We Can to remove me from their list of pledges, delete my data.

I still think the best donations are the ones backed by proper evidence, but I've got rid of the label.

And here is the impact I'm having.

And, you know, I found this when I used to work at Giving What We Can.

The more we encouraged people to talk about their giving in their circles or even just post about it on their social media, on their LinkedIn, they would find that, you know, more people actually like reached out to them and said, actually, that's amazing.

I had no idea that you were giving 10 percent of your income.