never mEAnt

I’ve read several LinkedIn posts on why people chose to take the Giving What We Can Pledge. Many of them include something along the lines of “I’m not posting this to seem smug and morally superior - I’m posting this to help normalise talking about giving significant sums of money to charity”. They then proceed to seem smug and morally superior. Which is to say that I am going to try my best to avoid being that way, I’m probably going to fail, but at least I’m not going to bullshit you about that.1 Today is my 29th birthday, and my present to myself was to take the pledge. If you’re unfamiliar, that means that I have committed to giving away 10% of my income to effective charities, for the rest of my career. I’m not going to go into detail as to why I think this is The Right Thing To Do, other than to link Peter Singer’s classic drowning child thought experiment and the Giving What We Can “How Rich Am I?” calculator. I don’t have anything to say that would be more persuasive than those two.