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komponisto comments on Efficient Charity - Less Wrong
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You are making the perfect (people donating to x-risks charities instead of buying personal luxuries) the enemy of the good (people donating to save lives instead of donating to provide trips to Disneyland).
If you know how to convince people (not LW regulars) to contribute to x-risk reduction, instead of buying shoes, then please do so. If not, it doesn't make sense to complain about efforts that can convince people to make immediate positive changes in their behavior while planting the seeds towards convincing them to more generally maximize expected utility.
My preference ordering is:
(people donating to x-risks charities instead of buying personal luxuries) > (people donating to save lives instead of buying personal luxuries)>(people donating to to provide trips to Disneyland instead of buying personal luxuries)>(people donating to x-risks charities instead of donating to provide trips to Disneyland)>(people donating to save lives instead of donating to provide trips to Disneyland).
EDIT: No, this is wrong; see below. Attention should be focused on the grandparent.
Your ordering raises the possibility that your preferences are nontransitive! :-)
I don't see the nontransitivity, but it does seem to imply:
which, while not inconsistent, seems to undervalue x-risk reduction relative to trips to Disneyland for cancer patients.
You're right. The penultimate item is too low; it should in fact be second.
All I really wanted to point out was the abundance of items between the first and the last, and the fact that (people donating to save lives instead of buying personal luxuries) is higher than (people donating to save lives instead of donating to provide trips to Disneyland).
This has incredibly marginal utility. It is effectively trading your luxury for the fuzzy feeling of providing luxury to another.
This has more utility. In fact, it bears a strong resemblance to
given that "providing trips to Disneyland" looks more like a luxury than charity.
I don't understand how you can prefer A>C but C>A*, unless you think that "preventing the purchase of personal luxuries" is worth more utility than preventing existential risk (A, A*) or saving lives (B, B*).
Yes, never mind -- see my reply to JGWeissman.
Where does the status quo fit into your preference ordering?