Impulse buying is a thing. We have ready-made clichés for picking it out. Analogously, ‘impulse giving’ is a thing, where you’re spontaneously moved by compassion to help someone out without any advance planning. The problem with most impulse giving is that it gives you the same warm glow and sense of moral license as high-impact giving, without making as much of a difference. Peter Singer puts it best:

My experience with the effective altruism community is that they don’t do much to encourage impulse giving of any kind. If you can give to low-impact charities in the heat of the moment, you should be able to do the same for high-impact charities; yet I think of ‘giving effectively’ as affectively cold, carefully budgeted.

This is probably mostly a good thing. We want people to think carefully about their big decisions, if it improves decision quality. However, the stereotype has its disadvantages. If people think they need to go through a long process of deliberation before they can give, they can end up procrastinating indefinitely. Borrowing Haidt’s analogy, we’re discouraging the elephant (our system-1 emotions and intuitions) from getting passionate and worked up about the most important things we do, while encouraging the elephant’s rider (our system-2 reasoning and deliberation) to overanalyze and agonize over decisions.

Effective altruism as it exists today is aligned with the legions and principalities of Order. I’d bet we can change that in some respects, if we so wish, without giving up our allegiance to Goodness.

Affective altruism

Eliezer Yudkowsky suggests that we “purchase fuzzies and utilons separately“. Better to spend some of your time on feel-good do-gooding and some on optimal high-impact do-gooding, rather than pursuing them simultaneously and doing a terrible job at both. In “Harry Potter and the Fuzzies of Altruism“, I noted that there are different kinds of fuzzies people can get for doing good.

One of these varieties is particularly valuable, because it doesn’t need to be purchased separately. I speak of the slytherfuzzy, that warm glow you get from being especially efficient and effective. Do-gooders who find cool, calculated pragmatism strongly motivating in its own right have an obvious leg up. I myself am more motivated by narrative, novelty, and love-of-neighbor than by Winning, but I’d love to find a way to steal that trick and bind my own reward center more tightly to humanitarian accomplishment.

If you’re trying to make yourself (or others) more enthusiastic about purchasing utilons, it may be helpful to make the way you buy utilons as fuzzy-producing as possible. This needn’t dilute the outcome. Select a charity based on a sober cost-benefit analysis, but give chaotically, if chaos happens to gel with your psychology. Impulse giving and effective altruism don’t have to be placed in separate mental boxes forever; we can invent new categories of behavior that wed Chaos Altruism’s giddy spontaneity to Order Altruism’s focus and rigor.

I’d expect mixed approaches to work best. E.g., you can settle on a fixed percentage of your income to give to a high-impact cause every year, but build a habit of giving bonus donations to that cause when the mood strikes you. I’m a big fan of using specific benevolence triggers. For example: ‘When someone on the street asks me for money, and I feel an urge to give them $X, give $X to a high-impact charity (whether or not I also give money to the individual who asked).’ Leah Libresco and Michael Blume make good use of this kind of ‘nudged giving’.

But I think we should also normalize whimsical, untriggered high-impact giving. If we start thinking of evidence-based humanitarianism as the kind of thing you can splurge on, I suspect we’ll come to see do-gooding as more of a fun opportunity and less of a burden.

Some people think of their philanthropy as a personal passion that drives them to excel, as in Holden Karnofsky’s “excited altruism“. Others think of their philanthropy as a universal moral obligation they’re striving to meet, as in Eliezer’s “one life against the world“. Try to fit all philanthropists into the ‘passion’ box, and you’ll get a contingent that feels cut off from what makes this work important; try to fit them all into the ‘obligation’ box, and you’ll get a contingent that feels burdened with a dour or guilt-inducing chore.

Likewise, there are important points of divergence between do-gooders who are motivated by different kinds of warm fuzzy (or hot blazing, or cool gliding, or wiggly sparkling…) feelings. I’m more of an obligation-based altruist, but I still find the ‘excited altruist’ framing useful. That I think in moralistic terms doesn’t say much about the specific feelings that drive me to do good in the moment.

Infectious altruism

My moralism also leaves open what feelings I should emphasize if I want to transfer my enthusiasm to others.

The ice bucket challenge is an example of memetically successful Chaos Altruism. Ditto today’s Giving Tuesday event, though an annual event is relatively compatible with the reign of Order. Will McAskill and Timothy Ogden have criticized these memes as possibly counterproductive, but it’s not obvious to me that the ineffectiveness of these events stems from their viral or ad-hoc character. Instead, those same attributes could be very valuable if they were targeted at more urgent causes.

McAskill and Ogden draw attention to the fact that charitable donations have been stuck at 2% of U.S. GDP for 40 years now. People (on average) seem to change where they donate, but not how much they donate. One approach to doing better, than, would be to redirect that 2% to worthier interventions.

At the same time, the success of the giving pledge shows that some people can be inspired to increase their donations. Perhaps we haven’t been able to rise above 2% because charities are too busy competing with each other to focus their advertising ingenuity on growing the pie. Perhaps some deep change in people’s mindset is needed; I’ll note that households giving to religious nonprofits donate twice as much. Relatedly, the key may be to shift entire (small) communities to giving more, so giving more is the norm among everyone you know. Then expand those supergiver tribes into neighboring social networks.

Experimenting with playful, unorthodox, and personalized modes of altruism seems like it could be useful for finding ways to make inroads in new communities. Over the next few years, I think we should place more focus on self-experimentation and object-level research than on outreach; but we should still keep in mind that we need a better handle on human motivation if we’re going to completely restructure the way charity is done. For that reason, I’m eager to hear whether any aspiring effective altruists find Chaos approaches attractive.