Invalid logic. What the people around you generally want more of is your attention, to validate their sense of status or acceptance. If you were spending your time on some form of conspicuous consumption, this would be equally disliked as a resource drain.
TL;DR: any time you spend time and resources on something other than the people you're in relationship with, they're not going to like it that much. Altruism has fuck-all to do with it, except as your own signaling that you're a good person and the people you're with are selfish jerks.
Um, your "TL;DR" summary is longer than the rest of your comment. (Not that either actually is too long to read.)
What kind of activity are you talking about?
If it's saving children and birds, this doesn't make you less attractive to the opposite sex, quite the contrary.
If it's research work, move into a respectable academic setting. I don't think people view Judea Pearl, Marcus Hutter or Daniel Kahneman as dangerously weird, but each of them did more for "our cause" than most of us combined.
If it's advocacy, well, I kinda see why the spouses are complaining. Advocacy sucks, find something better to do with your life.
I would not have been able to write and pursue a day job at the same time. You seem to have incredibly naive ideas about the amount of time and energy needed to accomplish worthwhile things. There are historical exceptions to this rule, but they are (a) exceptions and (b) we don't know how much faster they could have worked if they'd been full-time.
Sorry, I didn't mean to insult you. Also I didn't downvote your comment, someone else did.
What worries me is the incongruity of it all. What if Einstein, instead of working as a patent clerk and doing physics at the same time, chose to set up a Relativity Foundation to provide himself with money? What if this foundation went on for ten years without actually publishing novel rigorous results, only doing advocacy for the forthcoming theory that will revolutionize the physics world? This is just, uh...
A day job is actually the second recourse that comes to mind. The first recourse is working in academia. There's plenty of people there doing research in logic, probability, computation theory, game theory, decision theory or any other topic you consider important. Robin Hanson is in academia. Nick Bostrom is in academia. Why build SIAI?
Just as an aside, note that Nick Bostrom is in academia in the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford that he personally founded (as Eliezer founded SIAI) and that has been mostly funded by donations (like the SIAI), mainly those of James Martin. That funding stream allows the FHI to focus on the important topics that they do focus on, rather than devoting all their energy to slanting work in favor of the latest grant fad. FHI's ability to expand with new hires, and even to sustain operations, depends on private donations, although grants have also played important roles. Robin spent many years getting tenure, mostly focused on relatively standard topics.
One still needs financial resources to get things done in academia (and devoting one's peak years to tenure-optimized research in order to exploit post-tenure freedom has a sizable implicit cost, not to mention the opportunity costs of academic teaching loads). The main advantages, which are indeed very substantial, are increased status and access to funding from grant agencies.
Of course people spend their peak years working in those fields. If Eliezer took his decision theory stuff to academia he could pursue that in philosophy. Nick Bostrom's anthropic reasoning work is well-accepted in philosophy. But the overlap is limited. Robin Hanson's economics of machine intelligence papers are not taken seriously (as career-advancing work) by economists. Nick Bostrom's stuff on superintelligence and the future of human evolution is not career-optimal by a large margin on a standard philosophy track.
There's a growing (but still pretty marginal, in scale and status) "machine ethics" field, but analysis related to existential risk or superintelligence is much less career-optimal there than issues related to Predator drones and similar.
Some topics are important from an existential risk perspective and well-rewarded (which tends to result in a lot of talent working on them, with diminishing marginal returns) in academia. Others are important, but less rewarded, and there one needs slack to pursue them (donation funding for the FHI with a mission encompassing the work, tenure, etc).
There are various ways to respond to this. I see a lot of value in trying to seed certain areas, illuminating the problems in a respectable fashion so that smart academics (e.g. David Chalmers) use some of their slack on under-addressed problems, and hopefully eventually make those areas well-rewarded.
I think the hard problem is finding 10 capable and motivated researchers, and any such people would keep working even without SIAI.
Again: why isn't it obvious to you that it would be easier for these people to have a source of funding and a building to work in?
The problem with your example is that I don't work on FAI, I work on certain topics of philosophical interest to me that happen to be relevant to FAI theory. If I were interested in actually building an FAI, I'd definitely want a secure source of funding for a whole team to work on it full time, and a building to work in. It seems implausible that that's not a big improvement (in likelihood of success) over a bunch of volunteers working part time and just collaborating over the Internet.
More generally, money tends to be useful for getting anything accomplished. You seem to be saying that FAI is an exception, and I really don't understand why... Or are you just saying that SIAI in particular is doing a bad job with the money that it's getting? If that's the case, why not offer some constructive suggestions instead of just making "digs" at it?
But... create a big organization that generates no useful output, except providing you with some money to live on? Is it really the path of least effort? SIAI has existed for 10 years now and here are its glorious accomplishments broken down by year. Frankly, I'd be less embarrassed if Eliezer were just one person doing research!
Two points:
One. Charity, up to a point, is not necessarily a trade-off. Just as adding a hobby can make you more productive at work by forcing you to be efficient with your time, adding a charitable commitment can force you to stop wasting money. There is a reason why the Judaeo-Christian tradition recommends tithing; a tenth of income is a good rule of thumb for an amount that's significant but not enough to make you noticeably poorer.
Two. When people have personal problems as a result of altruism, I suspect it's the nature of the charity (futurist ideas sound useless to a lot of people) or the nature of the commitment (giving more than a tenth of income, for example) or some interpersonal issue that the altruist doesn't understand. I want to emphasize that last possibility. If you know you have Asperger's, you should be extra skeptical about your own ability to explain interpersonal behavior.
Spending time and effort on efficient charity in order to feel good about yourself doesn't make you feel any more good than not spending time on it, but it does cost you more money. The correct reason to spend most of your meager and hard-earned cash on efficient charity is because you already want to do good. But that is not an extra reason.
Look, I think Multifolaterose made one good point that you either missed or for some reason chose not to address:
Increasing the amount you donate to efficient charity by one order of magnitude can radically improv...
I wouldn't call the problem public choice, since most kinds of charity devote resources away from your immediate social network but only a few attract problems. If you used GiveWell's standards of efficiency, and gave to Stop Tuberculosis or VillageReach, I doubt you'd run into problems. It sounds like these problems are arising with futurist type charities where you're devoting your efforts and resources to causes that people close to you don't understand and find weird and offputting, which is a different source of trouble.
Just to underline something: multifoliaterose did give 5%. What's perhaps unusual is that he gave it in one swell foop.
IIRC, Americans give about 2%/year on the average, which implies it isn't all that unusual to give twice that much.
I doubt it's possible to stop seeing the untested effectiveness of most charities once you've seen it.
Have you considered that some of us might have utility functions that do have terms for socially distant people? Thus the charity can give direct utility to us, which seems ignored by the analysis.
Second, end points rarely are optimal. E.g. eating only tuna and nothing else could be unhealthy and weird, but that does not imply that eating some tuna is unhealthy or weird. Thus your analysis seems to miss the obvious answer.
Is this the right place to engage in thread necromancy? We'll see.
I've been troubled by the radical altruism argument for some years, and never had a very satisfactory reason for rejecting it. But I just thought of an argument against it. In brief, if people believe that their obligation is to give just about everything they have to charity, then they have created a serious disincentive to create more wealth.
It starts with the argument against pure socialism. In that system, each person works as hard as he or she can in order to produce for the good of so...
Spending time and effort on efficient charity in order to feel good about yourself doesn't make you feel any more good than not spending time on it, but it does cost you more money. The correct reason to spend most of your meager and hard-earned cash on efficient charity is because you already want to do good. But that is not an extra reason.
Look, I think Multifolaterose made one good point that you either missed or for some reason chose not to address:
Increasing the amount you donate to efficient charity by one order of magnitude can radically improve your self-esteem, productivity, and mental integrity in ways that you would not have expected based merely on your desire to do good.
In other words, if you calculate U(charity) = U(status) + U(doing good), you will seriously underestimate U(charity). You must also include a term for charity's surprising effect on your psyche; U(charity) = U(status) + U(doing good) + U(being good).
Yes you can do well whilst doing some good, but the point is that it is a trade-off. Yes, I agree that there are points on this trade-off that are better than either extrema for a given utility function.
OK, but you shouldn't be quite so cavalier about it. If the actual equilibrium point involves 5x or 10x current donation levels, and rational thinking can help people move toward that equilibrium point, then there's this huge opportunity for us to help people help both themselves and others by explaining to them why charity is awesome-r than they thought. The way you phrase your disclaimer seems to suggest that the trade-off will inevitably break down differently for different people to the point where we shouldn't worry about it.
But if you know that you're doing charity in order to increase your U(charity), then it's not charity, and it doesn't work.
The reason that we live in good times is that markets give people a selfish incentive to seek to perform actions that maximize total utility across all humans in the relevant economy: namely, they get paid for their efforts. Without this incentive, people would gravitate to choosing actions that maximized their own individual utility, finding local optima that are not globally optimal. Capitalism makes us all into efficient little utilitarians, which we all benefit enormously from.
The problem with charity, and especially efficient charity, is that the incentives for people to contribute to it are all messed up, because we don't have something analogous to the financial system for charities to channel incentives for efficient production of utility back to the producer. One effect of giving away lots of your money and effort to seriously efficient charity is that you create the counterpoint public choice problem to the special interests problem in politics. You harm a concentrated interest (friends, potential partners, children) in order to reward a diffuse interest (helping each of billions of people by a tiny amount).
The concentrated interest then retaliates, because by standard public choice theory it has an incentive to do so, but the diffuse interest just ignores you. Concretely, your friends think that you're weird and potential partners may, in the interest of their own future children, refrain from involvement with you. People in general may perceive you as being of lower status, both because of your reduced ability to signal status via conspicuous consumption if you give a lot of money away, and because of the weirdness associated with the most efficient charities.
Anyone involved in futurism, singularitarianism etc, has probably been on the sharp end of this public choice problem. Presumably, anyone in the west who donated a socially optimal amount of money to charity (i.e. almost everything) would also be on the sharp end (though I know of no cases of someone donating 99.5% of their disposable income to any charity, so we have no examples). This is the Altruist's Burden.
Evidence
Do people around you really punish you for being an altruist? This claim requires some justification.
First off, I have personal experience in this area. Not me, but someone vitally important in the existential risks movement has been put under pressure by ver partner to participate less in existential risk so that the relationship would benefit. Of course, I cannot give details, and please don't ask for them or try to make guesses. I personally have suffered, as have many, from low-level punishment from and worsening of relationships with my family, and social pressure from friends; being perceived as weird. I have also become more weird - spending one's time optimally for social status and personal growth is not at all like spending one's time in a way so as to reduce existential risks. Furthermore, thinking that the world is in grave danger but only you and a select group of people understand makes you feel like you are in a cult due to the huge cognitive dissonance it induces.
In terms of peer-reviewed research, it has been shown that status correlates with happiness via relative income. It has also been shown that (in men) romantic priming increases spending on "conspicuous luxuries but not on basic necessities" and it also "did induce more helpfulness in contexts in which they could display heroism or dominance". In women "mating goals boosted public—but not private— helping". This means that neither gender would seem to be using their time optimally in contributing to a cause that is not widely seen as worthy, and that men especially may be letting themselves down by spending a significant fraction of income on charity of any kind, unless it somehow signaled heroism (and therefore bravery) and dominance.
The usual reference on purchase of moral satisfaction and scope insensitivity is this article by Eliezer, though there are many articles on it.
The studies on status and romantic priming constitute evidence (only a small amount each) that the concentrated interest -- the people around you -- do punish you. In theoretical terms, it should be the default hypothesis: either your effort goes to the many or it goes to the few around you. If you give less to the concentrated interest that is the few around you, they will give less to you.
The result that people purchase moral satisfaction rather than maximizing social welfare further confirms this model: in fact it explains what charity we do have as signalling, and drives a wedge between the kind and extent of charity that is beneficial to you personally, and the kind and extent that maximizes your contribution to social welfare.
Can you do well by doing good?
Mutifoliaterose claimed that you can. In particular, he claimed that by carefully investigating efficient charity, and then donating a large fraction of your wealth, you will do well personally, because you will feel better about yourself. The refutation is that many people have found a more efficient way to purchase moral satisfaction: don't spend your time and energy on investigating efficient charity, make only a small donation, and use your natural human ability to neglect the scope of your donation.
Spending time and effort on efficient charity in order to feel good about yourself doesn't make you feel any more good than not spending time on it, but it does cost you more money.
The correct reason to spend most of your meager and hard-earned cash on efficient charity is because you already want to do good. But that is not an extra reason.
My disagreement with Multifoliaterose's post is more fundamental than these details, though. "It's not to the average person's individual advantage to maximize average utility" is the fundamental theorem of social science. It's like when someone brings you a perpetual motion machine design. You know it's wrong, though yes, it is important to point out the specific error.
Edit: some people in the comments have said that if you just donate a small amount (say 5% of disposable income) to an efficient but non-futurist charity, you can do very well yourself, and help people. Yes you can do well whilst doing some good, but the point is that it is a trade-off. Yes, I agree that there are points on this trade-off that are better than either extrema for a given utility function.