I just put in 2700 USD, the current balance of my bank account, and I'll find some way to put in more by the end of the challenge.
Not that I don't think your donation is admirable, but I'm curious how you are able to donate your entire bank account without running the risk of not being able to respond to a black-swan event appropriately and your future well-being and ability to donate to SIAI being compromised?
Do you think it's rational in general for people to donate all their savings to the SIAI?
I have a high limit credit card which I pay off every month, no other form of debt, no expenses until my next paycheck, a very secure, well-paying job with good health insurance, significant savings in the form of stocks and bonds, and several family members and friends who would be willing to help me in the event of some catastrophe.
I prepare and structure my life such that I can take action without fear. I attribute most of this to reading the book Your Money Or Your Life while I was in college. My only regret is that I can afford to give more, but fail to have the cash on hand due to lifestyle expenditures and saving for my own personal future.
Wait ... I assume you're planning to actually mail the check too?
Yes, I mailed the check, too, just after writing the comment. (And I wrote and mailed it to SIAI. No tricks, it really is a donation.)
I would be surprised if karma scaled linearly with dollars over that range.
And to encourage others to donate, let it be known that I just made a 500 euro (about 655 USD) donation.
I donated $100 yesterday. I hope to donate more by the end of the matching period, but for now that's around my limit (I don't have much money).
I put in $500, really pinches in Indian rupees (Rs. 23,000+). Hoping for the best to happen next year with a successful book release and promising research to be done.
On the one hand, I absolutly abhore SIAI. On the other hand, I'd love to turn my money into karma...
/joke
$100
I just donated $1,370. The reason why it's not a round number is interesting, and I'll write a Discussion post about it in a minute. EDIT: Here it is.
Also, I find it interesting that (before my donation) the status bar for the challenge was at $8,500, and the donations mentioned here totaled (by my estimation) about $6,700 of that...
I seem to remember reading a comment saying that if I make a small donation now, it makes it more likely I'll make a larger donation later, so I just donated £10.
Ben Franklin effect, as well as consistency bias. Good on you for turning a bug into a feature.
Donated $500 CAD just now.
By the way, SIAI is still more than 31,000 US dollars away from its target.
Darn it; I j just made my annual donation a few days ago, but hopefully my employer's matching donation will come in during the challenge period. I will make sure to make my 2011 donation during the matching period (i.e. well before January 20th), in an amount no less than $1000.
Wow, SIAI has succeeded in monetizing Less Wrong by selling karma points. This is either a totally awesome blunder into success or sheer Slytherin genius.
I have donated a small amount of money.
The Singularity is now a little bit closer and safer because of your efforts. Thank you. We will send a receipt for your donations and our newsletter at the end of the year. From everyone at the Singularity Institute – our deepest thanks.
I do hope they mean they will send a receipt and newsletter by e-mail, and not by physical mail.
I feel rather uncomfortable at seeing someone mention that he donated, and getting a response which indirectly suggests that he's being irrational and should have donated more.
The idea is that the optimal method of donation is to donate as much as possible to one charity. Splitting your donations between charities is less effective, but still benefits each. They actually have a whole page about how valuable small donations are, so I doubt they'd hold a grudge against you for making one.
Actions which increase utility but do not maximise it aren't "pointless". If you have two charities to choose from, £100 to spend, and you get a constant 2 utilons/£ for charity A and 1 utilon/£ for charity B, you still get a utilon for each pound you donate to B, even if to get 200 utilons you should donate £100 to A. It's just the wrong word to apply to the action, even assuming that someone who says he's donated a small amount is also saying that he's donated a small proportion of his charitable budget (which it turns out wasn't true in this case).
Michael Anissimov posted the following on the SIAI blog:
Thanks to the generosity of two major donors; Jaan Tallinn, a founder of Skype and Ambient Sound Investments, and Edwin Evans, CEO of the mobile applications startup Quinly, every contribution to the Singularity Institute up until January 20, 2011 will be matched dollar-for-dollar, up to a total of $125,000.
Interested in optimal philanthropy — that is, maximizing the future expected benefit to humanity per charitable dollar spent? The technological creation of greater-than-human intelligence has the potential to unleash an “intelligence explosion” as intelligent systems design still more sophisticated successors. This dynamic could transform our world as greatly as the advent of human intelligence has already transformed the Earth, for better or for worse. Thinking rationally about these prospects and working to encourage a favorable outcome offers an extraordinary chance to make a difference. The Singularity Institute exists to do so through its research, the Singularity Summit, and public education.
We support both direct engagements with the issues as well as the improvements in methodology and rationality needed to make better progress. Through our Visiting Fellows program, researchers from undergrads to Ph.Ds pursue questions on the foundations of Artificial Intelligence and related topics in two-to-three month stints. Our Resident Faculty, up to four researchers from three last year, pursues long-term projects, including AI research, a literature review, and a book on rationality, the first draft of which was just completed. Singularity Institute researchers and representatives gave over a dozen presentations at half a dozen conferences in 2010. Our Singularity Summit conference in San Francisco was a great success, bringing together over 600 attendees and 22 top scientists and other speakers to explore cutting-edge issues in technology and science.
We are pleased to receive donation matching support this year from Edwin Evans of the United States, a long-time Singularity Institute donor, and Jaan Tallinn of Estonia, a more recent donor and supporter. Jaan recently gave a talk on the Singularity and his life at a entrepreneurial group in Finland. Here’s what Jaan has to say about us:
“We became the dominant species on this planet by being the most intelligent species around. This century we are going to cede that crown to machines. After we do that, it will be them steering history rather than us. Since we have only one shot at getting the transition right, the importance of SIAI’s work cannot be overestimated. Not finding any organisation to take up this challenge as seriously as SIAI on my side of the planet, I conclude that it’s worth following them across 10 time zones.”
– Jaan Tallinn, Singularity Institute donor
Make a lasting impact on the long-term future of humanity today — make a donation to the Singularity Institute and help us reach our $125,000 goal. For more detailed information on our projects and work, contact us at institute@intelligence.org or read our new organizational overview.
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Kaj's commentary: if you haven't done so recently, do check out the SIAI publications page. There are several new papers and presentations, out of which I thought that Carl Shulman's Whole Brain Emulations and the Evolution of Superorganisms made for particularly fascinating (and scary) reading. SIAI's finally starting to get its paper-writing machinery into gear, so let's give them money to make that possible. There's also a static page about this challenge; if you're on Facebook, please take the time to "like" it there.
(Full disclosure: I was an SIAI Visiting Fellow in April-July 2010.)