Putting a Very Small Amount of Money Where My Mouth Is

I've just donated $100 to MIRI  ( https://intelligence.org/ )

I don't understand why I've just done it.

It's a pathetic amount of money. I can't see how it could make any difference to anything. I'm embarrassed by it. It's about £75, and I've been known to spend that kind of money on lunch.

On my guilt pile, right in front of me, is a 23andme genetic testing kit, that I bought out of mild curiosity about a year ago, and have been meaning to get around to registering and sending back ever since. So I know that I will spend £200 on a whim, which will then be derailed by my mild dislike of filling in forms. ( I note that I am thinking this thought, and not doing anything about it even though the kit is in front of me, and I am at a computer. I am busy writing this blog post now. I will totally do it later.....)

It was hard to do. One particularly difficult barrier that I needed to overcome was that such donations, to an American charity, are likely tax-deductible. Which is to say that the British Government can likely be persuaded to add another £20 or so on top. I didn't know if there was some special, but complicated thing I had to do in order to get that to happen.

It was very very hard to say "Fuck that. Just make the damned donation." It felt like throwing money away. The same feeling that makes me feel horribly about lovingly and beautifully wrapped Christmas presents.  The waste. The destruction. I feel them very strongly. ( I must review that feeling. It is not helpful. The crime is very small. )

But God damn it, I did it anyway. And now that I have, I realise that all I have to do is tell my accountant about it, and he will sort it out. And actually, £20 here or there, who cares? It's probably not worth bothering my accountant about.

If I don't bother to claim it back, the government will just spend it on government-crap. And some of the government-crap may even be helpful to someone, somewhere.



MIRI is fairly well funded these days, although they don't have anything like the funding they should have, given the importance of the problem they're trying to address.

A reasonable level of funding, in my mind, would be something in the order of 10% of the output of the economy of the world.

The only reason I put the figure that low is that Artificial General Intelligence is not about to kill us any time soon, as far as I can see.

It doesn't look to me like the sort of thing that will happen within the next decade, although I'm not at all confident about that, but it does look to me like the sort of thing that will very likely happen within this century.

Which is to say that I wouldn't be particularly surprised if it killed me in my old age, and I wouldn't be particularly surprised if it didn't.

But I would be quite surprised if it didn't at some point in the next hundred years kill everyone in the world, including, of course, all the little children that I know, who will grow up over the coming century.

But it's not an urgent problem. The urgent problems are the things that could go wrong today, like a nuclear exchange causing a nuclear winter and wiping out all the higher life on the planet.

And there are less urgent problems, like deliberately engineered pandemics or rogue nanotechnology, that seem very deadly and very difficult to stop.

But those are all problems that are likely beyond my ability to influence.

The AGI problem is a maths and philosophy problem. It needs fundamental research. As far as I can tell, MIRI are going about the sort of thing that I'm supposed to be good at in exactly the right sort of way.

Every few extra dollars they have is another hour or so of someone clever thinking about this really important, really hard problem before it kills us all.

This is my best guess at what's going on, and I've thought it for years.

And yet, I've never previously given them any money.

If you're in this position, if there's some weird force preventing you from taking this obvious, correct, important action, then just try donating a very small sum of money, to see how it feels. Make it a sum so small that you don't care about it. Even if it's just a dollar or something.

It feels good.

It doesn't matter if it doesn't do any good. It doesn't matter if you're not doing it efficiently. It doesn't matter if they spend it all on promoting dubious rationality workshops or if they spend it on champagne and oysters at some polyamorous weirdo-party in the notoriously expensive San Francisco Bay, or if it goes to building a one hundred foot high golden statue of Eliezer Yudkowsky.

It doesn't matter if it's all a cult or if they saw you coming a mile off.

It's a trivial sum of money.

Just do it.

It feels good.

Here's the link:


https://intelligence.org/donate/

It's paypal. You set the amount and type your credit card details in. That's it.

In return, you'll get a nice automatic e-mail of thanks to whatever e-mail address you gave paypal. That's it.

Just do it, now.

A barrier is broken. It doesn't look like a hard thing to do in retrospect. I don't feel like a fool.

It feels great.

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P.S. It is very much the point of this post that you should just ignore any trivial considerations that are getting in the way of doing what you think you should do.

But if you want to donate a large sum of money, and you're sure that the extra effort involved won't deter you, then it is possible to do it in a tax-efficient manner. See:

https://intelligence.org/donate/tax-advantaged-donations/

or get in touch with colm@intelligence.org , who I am sure will be happy to advise and help you.