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Will_Sawin comments on Efficient Charity: Do Unto Others... - Less Wrong
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Maybe I'm just being naive here, but in a case that straightforward and that possible for the average person to understand, where there's nothing odd or unprestigious about the action and lots of people are doing it already, where, on the margins, an additional American life is saved each time another person donates blood, I have trouble believing that even a world this insane wouldn't push blood donations a little harder.
I take it that you're suggesting marginal analysis based on the standard correct classical causal decision theory (in which no one is responsible for saving a life by donating blood unless someone would have actually died had that donation not been made) out of either belated humility about the probability of an SIAI-originating decision theory being correct, or because you're planning to actually convince someone and you don't want to invoke Hofstadterian superrationality in place of the standard correct decision theory?
:)
My guess would be that at the margin, a blood donation saves less than 0.00001 lives. (Otherwise, compensation would be increased for the paid donors). But, if you want to use a TDT/UDT style analysis, here are some relevant statistics from the American Red Cross:
Given these numbers, I would estimate that roughly 0.5 million (US) lives are saved (more accurately, extended) by blood products annually. If you adopt the assumption that all blood comes from voluntary, uncompensated donations, and divide those 0.5 million lives among the 16 million annual donations, you get one life saved for every 32 pints donated - not as much as jsteinhardt hoped, but still significant enough to earn a major warm-and-fuzzy.
My actions and your actions aren't perfectly correlated, because we're somewhat different.
No matter how you handle this, it seems to suggest that my donation would acausally affect some fraction of other people's donations. So it might count as, e.g., +/- 2 million, which is still more-or-less marginal, since the costs are multiplied as well.
Maybe more than that?
It's stil a far cry from just dividing 5 million/16 million.
Edit: Isn't utility maximized if the abstract computations "What humans do" and "The thing with greatest marginal benefit" equalized, though? If utility is convex, yes. So there should be some other rule, like, if you're at a bad equilibrium, act so as to break it. I am unsure how this works.