komponisto comments on On Charities and Linear Utility - Less Wrong

13 Post author: Anatoly_Vorobey 04 February 2011 02:13PM

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Comment author: Psychohistorian 04 February 2011 09:09:32PM *  4 points [-]

Your entire point seems to be that it's better to give to multiple charities when the joint utility of giving to those charities exceeds the benefit of giving all the money to one charity.

This circumstance exists in the real world for most individuals so infrequently as to be properly ignored. It is extremely unlikely that there is some combination of charities such that giving $5,000 to each of them will generate substantially better returns than giving $10,000 to the best available charity. Unless I'm ignoring important evidence, charities just don't work together that comprehensively, and non-huge sums of money do not have dramatic enough effects that it would be efficient to split them up.

Also, you chose an incredibly dense and inefficient way to make what seems like a very simple point.

Comment author: komponisto 04 February 2011 11:08:12PM *  15 points [-]

Also, you chose an incredibly dense and inefficient way to make what seems like a very simple point

In general, I would caution against criticisms of this form for several reasons:

  • different thinking styles: what seems unnecessarily convoluted to one person may seem utterly natural to another;
  • hindsight bias: something may appear simple after you've worked it out, but that doesn't mean that working it out was easy while you were doing it;
  • incentives: one should think very carefully before writing any comment that sounds like "this post really ought not to have been written".
Comment author: Psychohistorian 06 February 2011 12:01:30AM *  1 point [-]

incentives: one should think very carefully before writing any comment that sounds like "this post really ought not to have been written".

While I don't necessarily hold that opinion of this particular post, it's a defensible position. I think that posts that use relatively complicated math where simple English would suffice substantially and negatively affect the quality of discourse. If someone has a OK point to make, it is arguably better that they not make it at all than that they make it in a convoluted manner, because that suggests to other people that it's OK to make such posts. It's certainly better that they start it out in the discussion section so that it turns into a more comprehensible post on the main page. Of course, the more original or interesting their actual idea, the more the benefits outweigh the costs.

Your different thinking styles criticism is absolutely on point though, I admit, assuming it actually applies.

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