{"items": [{"author": "Allison", "source_link": "https://plus.google.com/109502185221418876252", "anchor": "gp-1318864271227", "service": "gp", "text": "I think your list as a whole has the problem that \"give money to advocacy for some law which would help a lot\" does. It's very hard to know whether your unpaid overtime is the thing that is influencing when you get promoted or whether your company succeeds or fails, or whether your attempt to become more marketable in your field or found a start-up will really pay off. It's also hard to know what impact your influence on others' giving really has, particularly when you are one of many factors influencing them or when you don't personally know them. Without a good way to gauge these things (which is, I would guess, in most cases going to be available in hindsight if at all), I think only the part-time work example and possibly, for someone with the right skills, volunteering for a meta-charity are directly comparable to local action that does some measurable amount of good right away. \n
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\nThat doesn't mean the other choices might not work out to more good being done, but it's hard for me to see how an individual can be expected to accurately evaluate the question, particularly given that humans have a tendency to grossly overestimate the impact of actions with a very small chance of doing a large amount of good or harm.", "timestamp": 1318864271}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://plus.google.com/103013777355236494008", "anchor": "gp-1318866873277", "service": "gp", "text": "@Allison\n Definitely. They're hard to measure as they sit. Some of them might be measurable, or at least reducible to simpler questions, though:\n
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\nUnpaid Overtime: How much of the company do you have options on? What might it sell for? Say you have options on 0.1% of a startup that might sell for 100M. For each percentage point more likely you make it to sell (taking it from 25% to 26%) likely to sell you make $1K. At this rate, something like working 50hr/week instead of 40hr/week for a year would have to make the company 10 percentage points (taking it from 25% to 35%) more likely to sell to come out to $20hr for the extra work. Which is unrealistic. But putting in some overtime at a crucial moment when the company really needs you? Then for 20hr you might actually up it by 5 percentage points. Which is $250/hr. So it looks to me like you shouldn't usually do this, but it might sometimes be worth it.\n
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\nIncrease Earnings Capacity: Say you have a BA and are considering going to night school to get a master's in your field. Perhaps you it's supposed to take about 20hr/week over four years and costs $20K. So 4K hours. You can look at earnings in your field, average for bachelor's and master's with the same number of years of experience. Perhaps the wage differential is $5K, for an increase of $150K over 30 years of work. Subtracting the tuition gives us a gain of $130K. This puts the time at school at around $31/hr. You'd want to use the right numbers for your situation, though.", "timestamp": 1318866873}]}