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Blueberry comments on Conflicts Between Mental Subagents: Expanding Wei Dai's Master-Slave Model - Less Wrong
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I think that for some people it’s sometimes rational to avoid beggars. Recalling your post Doing your good deed for the day, it seems plausible that for some people, giving money to beggars is likely to lower their motivation to do other good things. Giving money to beggars is probably not a cost-effective charitable activity. So it’s plausible that some people should not give money to beggars. On the other hand, the act of refusing to help people in need can be desensitizing and can lower one’s future desire to help other people. So for some, beggar avoidance might be an important part of helping people.
Sure, to the extent that this is the case, it’s an artifact of arbitrary features of the human brain, but we don’t have freedom to alter the features of our brains at will, and for the time being we're stuck with some of them and have to make the best of our situation. Making the best of our situation may involve apparently contradictory behavior such as beggar avoidance.
There's a good reason to avoid bums completely independent of donating money: they smell horrible and are generally unpleasant to be close to. Crossing the street to avoid the smell or risk from them seems perfectly sane goal-directed behavior to me
Even when beggars don't smell, it's rational to avoid socially awkward situations, if you are bothered by them. This is the same reason I don't answer the phone when I know it's a telemarketer calling.