Unless you donate a lot of money you're not going to affect the marginal good of donating to that charity. This means that whatever you think has the highest expected marginal good then it will remain so.
Er, yeah, of course. That's totally right.
You also should not be risk averse when it comes to charity; since the planets population is quite large.
I'm not sure that conclusion follows as strongly as you think it does. Given a choice between an exactly 10% chance of saving exactly 11 lives and a perfect guarantee of saving 1 life, I guess I'd go with .10 * 11 = 1.1 expected lives. But given a variety of charities with uncertain effectiveness and uncertain error bars, it seems sensible to diversify my portfolio. I could be objectively wrong about whether Deworming the World is better than the best water-treatment charity, but it's unlikely that any one charity or combination of charities is significantly and knowably better than a small basket of some of the best charities in different categories. In short, I think there's a difference between diversifiying and hedging -- you don't need to hedge with individual charities, but you should still diversify.
Er, I meant my comment about what you plant to do with the prize, not as a comment on your essay.
Well, it's not my essay -- it's Giving What We Can's. I just plagiarized it, on the theory that they would see it as good publicity and wouldn't mind. I'm giving them half by way of guilt money, and in case they can think of something better to do with the money. If not, they can just pass their $50 on to Deworming the World.
It's important to understand why you normally diversify. The reason why diversification is a good idea is because you have diminishing marginal utility of wealth. This reason just doesn't apply to charity. Your contributions make such a small difference that even if "total utility" had diminishing returns to live saved (debatable), over your range of influence it has effectively constant returns.
I agree that it's emotionally attractive to diversify, but it's simply incorrect to do so (though if your choices are of similar quality, it's not the wo...
Reposted from a few days ago, noting that jsalvatier (kudos to him for putting up the prize money, very community spirited) has promised $100 to the winner, and I have decided to set a deadline of Wednesday 1st December for submissions, as my friend has called me and asked me where the article I promised him is. This guy wants his god-damn rationality already, people!
My friend is currently in a potentially lucrative management consultancy career, but is considering getting a job in eco-tourism because he "wants to make the world a better place" and we got into a debate about Efficient Charity, Roles vs. Goals, and Optimizing versus Acquiring Warm Fuzzies.
I thought that there would be a good article here that I could send him to, but there isn't. So I've decided to ask people to write such an article. What I am looking for is an article that is less than 1800 words long, and explains the following ideas:
but without using any unexplained LW Jargon. (Utilons, Warm Fuzzies, optimizing). Linking to posts explaining jargon is NOT OK. Just don't use any LW Jargon at all. I will judge the winner based upon these criteria and the score that the article gets on LW. Maybe the winning article will not rigidly meet all criteria: there is some flexibility. The point of the article is to persuade people who are, at least to some extent charitable and who are smart (university educated at a top university or equivalent) to seriously consider investing more time in rationality when they want to do charitable things.