dclayh comments on The Last Days of the Singularity Challenge - Less Wrong

19 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 26 February 2010 03:46AM

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Comment author: orangecat 27 February 2010 07:08:13AM 13 points [-]

$100 to general fund. I've recently received some unexpected cash and am looking at ways to increase humanity's expected utility. I'll be donating to SENS and the Methuselah Foundation as well. Where else should I be looking?

Comment author: dclayh 27 February 2010 07:24:29AM *  10 points [-]

Eliezer and SteveLandsburg agree: don't diversify your (altruistic) giving.

Comment author: ciphergoth 27 February 2010 03:49:19PM 16 points [-]

A friend points out one possible way this reasoning doesn't work: charities can gain political power by quoting a larger number of individual donors. This would argue for giving $10 to several charities and the rest of the money to the best one.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 28 February 2010 08:41:28PM 11 points [-]

I suspect that this reasoning is not only reasonably defensible, but also much more palatable; that the underlying biases are tested much less strongly by the policy conclusion "give the bulk of your money to one charity" than "give nothing to other charities". I will try to remember to use this version henceforth.

Comment author: ciphergoth 01 March 2010 08:42:03AM 8 points [-]

I have to confess, if I had a lot of money to donate I'd find it very hard to swallow this advice whole and give it all to the SIAI; I'd feel like donating half to GiveWell or suchlike would be a "hedge" against the possibility that I fear UFAI for irrational reasons I haven't identified. However, I can't find a reason to think that uncertainty about my own sanity will plug into the math any differently than any other kind of uncertainty.

Comment author: GuySrinivasan 27 February 2010 04:25:21PM 4 points [-]

Or perhaps giving $10+e to lots of people on the condition that they give $10 to the charity you'd like to target.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 28 February 2010 08:44:01PM 7 points [-]

This would make the IRS sad if they found out. You wouldn't like them when they're sad.

Comment author: GuySrinivasan 28 February 2010 09:02:15PM 7 points [-]

Good point. Even better, then: charity trades. I give $10 to your charity and you give $10 to my charity.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 01 March 2010 12:21:12AM 4 points [-]

Probably a wash if everyone does it, but might give a selective advantage to rationalists if practiced by rationalists only and the practice didn't spread beyond that... which seems unlikely in the long run, but not too impossible in the short run.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 27 February 2010 10:46:09PM 1 point [-]

charities can gain political power by quoting a larger number of individual donors

Could you give an example?

I doubt that the above charities are interested in the political power that can be bought that way.

Comment author: Document 28 February 2010 03:14:04AM 2 points [-]

Could you give an example?

I can't, but item five here makes a similar statement.

Under US tax law, a 501(c)(3) public charity must maintain a certain percentage of "public support". [...] If, over a four-year period, any one individual donates more than 2% of the organization's total support, anything over 2% does not count as "public support".

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 28 February 2010 06:24:58AM *  2 points [-]

That's a reason for large donors to diversify. It is not at all a reason for small donors to diversify.

Comment author: JGWeissman 28 February 2010 06:45:29AM *  0 points [-]

Edit: The parent, before being edited, at the time I responded, as I recall, read:

That's about large donors, not small donors

It now reads:

That's a reason for large donors to diversify. It is not at all a reason for small donors to diversify.

I am disappointed by this departure from LessWrong's excellent track record of not abusing the edit feature to change the context of responding comments.

End Edit

The point is that the more total money they get from small donors, the more money large donors can give without going over certain percentages of the total that have arbitrary legal significance.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 28 February 2010 06:50:00AM 0 points [-]

No, that's not the point.

Comment author: JGWeissman 28 February 2010 06:57:30AM 0 points [-]

I meant, that's the point of Document's quote from SIAI's statement about the value of small donors. It may not be an example of what ciphergoth was talking about, but it is about the importance of small donors.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 28 February 2010 07:11:52AM -1 points [-]

So, arguments are soldiers?

Comment author: JGWeissman 27 February 2010 10:23:21PM 0 points [-]

I don't want to diversify my altruistic giving of political clout any more than I want to diversify my altruistic giving of money.

So, here I explicitly declare that: I donate money exclusively to SIAI, because I believe it is the most efficient way of buying humanitarian utility.

Aggregated with similar people, is that worth any political clout?

Comment author: wedrifid 27 February 2010 10:49:57PM 0 points [-]

Aggregated with similar people, is that worth any political clout?

Not really. If SIAI made a fuss and about how many individual donors they got and they got some benefit from this then you would be best off... hang on I just read Guy's reply. I was just going to say 'donate under multiple names'.

Comment author: orangecat 28 February 2010 08:23:06PM *  4 points [-]

After shutting up and multiplying, I agree those arguments are valid. This presentation by Anna Salamon is also instructive.

I'm uncertain as to whether funding for SIAI or anti-aging research provides the best marginal utility. Both would have a gigantic positive impact if successful; SIAI's would be larger but in my estimation anti-aging has a better chance of success. The matching donations tip the balance to SIAI today, so $900 more is on the way.

I do believe the political argument with number of donors may apply to SENS and MF, so I'm making smaller donations there. I'm disappointed that curing aging hasn't been mentioned during the frequent discussions of rising health care costs; with more publicity and more donors willing to make the obvious point that aging and death suck, it might. In my estimation it will be easier for them to go mainstream than SIAI, so I believe it's most effective to separately target my monetary and political support.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 27 February 2010 07:28:12AM 2 points [-]

I usually try not to push people on this particular point unless I think they're already very high-level; my default assumption is that people are very akrasic and fragile when it comes to charity.

However, I'm raising my estimate of Landsburg's level based on this - I guess one mostly hears about the disputable points he got wrong, not the indisputable points he got right, of which this is one (and a rarely appreciated one at that).

Comment author: David_J_Balan 01 March 2010 01:18:34AM 1 point [-]

Landsburg's argument is sound, and I mostly follow it and occasionally try to sell others on it. But I can think of one exception, which is if the political power of an organization that you support depends on the number of members it has. So for example I pay membership dues to one organization that is not my main charity because I want them to be able to claim one more member.

And there is one place that I think Landsburg gets it plain wrong. He says*:

To please diverse stockholders, corporations tend to diversify their giving, often through the United Way. For individuals, by contrast, it really is quite impossible to justify that level of diversity. Surely among the hundreds of United Way recipients there are some you consider worthier than others. That means you can target your charity more effectively by bypassing the United Way.

But if you think that the United Way comes tolerably close to sharing your values, but you think that they have better information than you do about relative needs and competencies across different organizations, then it makes perfect sense to donate to them, doesn't it?

*http://www.slate.com/id/77619/

Comment author: David_J_Balan 01 March 2010 03:54:27AM -1 points [-]

I see ciphergoth already made my first point. Sorry about that.

Comment author: dclayh 02 March 2010 07:51:04AM 0 points [-]

I usually try not to push people on this particular point unless I think they're already very high-level; my default assumption is that people are very akrasic and fragile when it comes to charity.

Fair enough.

However, I'm raising my estimate of Landsburg's level based on this

Glad to hear it; I've been a fan of his for years, based mainly on his Slate column and his first two books.

Comment author: komponisto 27 February 2010 03:36:37PM *  0 points [-]

Um....you might want to have a look at Landsburg's math and see if you notice anything wrong.

ETA: Actually, never mind. I overlooked something. Silly me.

Of course, it's still a good exercise to check.

Comment deleted 27 February 2010 03:42:36PM [-]
Comment author: komponisto 27 February 2010 03:56:54PM *  0 points [-]

Here's my attempt at copy-and-paste, for those who have difficulty viewing (will require edits to fix):

[ETA: All right, can't get the LaTeX plugin to work, so I'll just use something like the old Usenet conventions.]

Suppose that there are three charities (the same argument would work with any number other than three), that those charities currently have endowments of x, y, and z, and that you plan to make contributions of delta x, delta y, and delta z). A truly charitable person will care only about each charity's final endowment, and so will seek to maximize some function

U(x + delta x, y + delta y, z + delta z)

subject to the constraint that delta x+ delta y + delta z = C, where C is the amount you've decided to give to charity.

But assuming that your contributions are small relative to the initial endowments, this quantity is well approximated by

U(x,y,z)+ (partial U/partial x) dot delta x + (partial U/partial y) dot delta y+ (partial U/partial z) dot delta z.

which is maximized by bulleting everything on the charity that corresponds to the largest of the partial derivatives.

(The linear approximation fails if your contributions are large relative to the initial endowments, or if you have sufficient delusions of grandeur to believe that your contributions are large relative to the initial endowments.)

Note that if you have any uncertainty about what the various charities will do with their endowments, the costs of that uncertainty can be built into the definition of the function U. Thus, such uncertainty in no way undermines the main argument.

On the other hand, if you care not about what the charitable organizations receive but about what you give to them (as would be the case, for example, if you give in order to enjoy being thanked), then you will want to maximize some function

U(x,y,z)

In this case, it's unlikely that the solution would be to bullet.

Comment author: ciphergoth 27 February 2010 04:10:28PM *  0 points [-]

Damn, sorry, I deleted the comment asking for this when I managed to find a way to read it. Thanks for sorting it out!

Is the error that he says x where he means delta-x in a couple of places?

Comment author: komponisto 27 February 2010 04:13:49PM 0 points [-]

Is the error that he says x where he means delta-x in a couple of places?

No, that was my copying mistake. Fixed.

Comment author: ciphergoth 28 February 2010 10:31:01AM 0 points [-]

Then I don't see the error, help me out?

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