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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Optimizing Fuzzies And Utilons: The Altruism Chip Jar - Less Wrong
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Risk aversion would apply if you were an egoist trying to make sure you got at least some warm glow. It does not apply if you're an altruist trying to help people as much as they can be helped.
This is not a complicated issue.
First I would like to note that I don't disagree with you in practice, though I remain sorely tempted to donate to Village Reach.
If your goal is not to maximize altruism, but rather to ensure a certain minimum level of altruism given massive uncertainty about the effectiveness of charities, I could see it being reasonable to split donations.
Let's imagine there are two competing existential risk reduction charities. We could call them, say, the Singularity Foundation and the Future of Humanity Cooperative. Neither of them are rated by Give Well because there are no real metrics for evaluating them. If your main concern is not to maximize altruism but to minimize the chance that you give all of your money to something practically useless, why not split? I think it's possible that timtyler means something like this by diversification, though of course I don't think that risk aversion trumps altruism.
No one who cares about helping people cares about that.
Only people trying to ensure a satisficing level of warm glow care about that.
What part of "Steven Landsburg was simply correct about what a rational agent should do" is so hard for people to come to terms with? Not every mistake can be excused as an amazing clever strategy in disguise.
I think he's right in a hypothetical world of rational donors who don't interact. I think his strategy fails to win in this world, where most actors aren't rational and where donors do interact in great clumps.
Maybe I'm being dumb but I don't see how that's likely to happen. What mechanism is going to cause more net altruism to be created by diversifying in order to influence irrational donors?
Leading by example, for one. It's somewhat similar to voting with dollars.
There is also the Pareto-like structure where you do a funding drive by starting with large donors and using them to recruit the next level down - "I gave $50k, you can give $10k." This works so well in practice that it's pretty much a standard way to run a proper funding drive. Note that it works by turning donors into co-conspirators.
Right, but is that more effective when you spread your donations than when you concentrate them?
Well, I suppose donating to less effective causes might incentivize donors interested in those causes to start donating "at all", and might be worthwhile if they couldn't be convinced to adopt the better charity instead. Is that what you mean?
In your hypothetical, is the goal to ensure a minimum level of altruistic effectiveness in total from all donors, or a minimum level attributable to your individual donation?
The former is more selflessly altruistic, but I think you mean the latter.
It's not complicated, yet in practice selecting for people who get this simple issue yielded Carl Shulman, and David Brin couldn't get it for some reason, so it seems like complicated or not, it's a good high-ceiling indicator.