Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: What's in a GWWC Pin?, published by JWS on April 21, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
Earlier this year I got an email telling me that I could receive (if I wished) a GWWC pledge pin after completing the first year of being a pledger. So I sent off a form, and after waiting a little while longer, a small package arrived at my door with the pin inside.
I wanted to write this post about that year much closer to the time I received it, but as always real life got in the way! But that extra time got me thinking more about what goes into the pin, and I think the resulting post is better.
Physically
The pin is actually a little bit larger than other charitable pins.[1]
It's metal, mostly black with some gold colour that accents the edges of the pin and highlights the GWWC logo in the middle. It's a nice, minimal, slick design.
And… that's kind of it from this perspective. Literally, that's what's in a GWWC pin. But reductionist physicalism is like, so false, and it can't give us good explanations of the world. The atoms that make up the pin, and the laws that governed their movement there matter much less than why the pin came to be in my possession, and what that means.
Financially
To qualify for a pledge pin, you have to:[2]
Have been a GWWC Pledger for more than 1 year
Be at 100% or more of the amount that you pledged to give (dated from when your Pledge began)
In practice, you qualify if you donate 10% of your income for a year. In my case, I donated 10% of my pre-tax income, but GWWC also counts gift-aid so technically I donated 125% of my pledged amount,[3] but I don't really think of that when I make my donations.
In practice, I found it was fairly easy for me to live as I was used to without making major changes while taking the pledge, but I am likely to find it easier than others given that I have no dependents, and am generally have a fairly prudent disposition towards personal spending. The major thing was probably lower savings, but even here I think I've done ok, though counterfactually less well off than I would have been otherwise from a purely monetary perspective.
This is definitely something to bear in mind, and the commitments of the pledge aren't necessarily for everyone at all points of life. Furthermore, the 10% donation point is probably about where I've made all of the 'easy' trade-offs[4] regarding personal spending and lifestyle, and in practice I had sent up a recurring donation so it acted more like 'income forgone' than 'having to give away my hard-earned money', at least from pyschologically.
If I were to start giving even more, I expect having to make more significant concessions and compromises, and I'm not sure I feel in a position to do that yet.
But again, this still a purely behavioural explanation. I gave 10% of my income, filled out a form, and got sent a pin. We can still do better about finding out what's in the pin.
Charitably
An even better explanation might be where I decided to donate my 10%. So, thanks to the nifty new dashboard feature on the GWWC website, here's the % breakdown of my donations since the beginnings of my pledge:
As you can see, there's definitely a spread of donations between causes and charities. I am a believer in moral pluralism and worldview diversification, and eschew EV-maxxing perspectives on my donations.[5] I feel unsure about what it means to do good or how to act under this uncertainty. I very much nodded along to the perspective Dustin shared in this article, but of course from many orders of magnitude less wealth with which to donate!
This doesn't reflect any modal donation though. Instead, I mostly donate through a recurring donation that I split between the major cause areas, with Global Health & Development the top, followed by Animal Welfare, with Longtermism being the smallest amount. (F...

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