Caspian comments on Tallinn-Evans $125,000 Singularity Challenge - Less Wrong

27 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 26 December 2010 11:21AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 27 December 2010 06:31:09PM 2 points [-]

Unless, of course, you believe that the decisions of other people donating to charity are correlated with your own. In this case, a decision to donate 100% of your money to SIAI would mean that all those people implementing a decision process sufficiently similar to your own would donate 100% of their money to SIAI. A decision to donate 50% of your money to SIAI and 50% to Charity Option B would imply a similar split for all those people as well.

If there are enough people like this, then the total amount of money involved may be large enough that the linear approximation does not hold. In that case, it seems natural to me to assume that, if both charity options are worthwhile, significantly increasing the successfulness of both charities is more important than increasing SIAI's successfulness even more significantly. Thus, you would donate 50%/50%.

Overall, the argument you link to seems to me to parallel (though inexactly) the argument that voting is pointless considering how unlikely your vote is to swing the outcome.

Comment author: Caspian 02 January 2011 02:34:43PM 2 points [-]

Also your errors in choosing a charity won't necessarily be random. For example, if you trust your reasoning to pick the best three charities, but suspect if you had to pick just one you'd end up influenced by deceptive marketing, bad arguments, or your biases you'd rather not act on, and the same applies to other people, you may be better off not choosing between them, and better off if other people don't try to choose between them.