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Anatoly_Vorobey comments on On Charities and Linear Utility - Less Wrong
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If everyone was to take Landsburg's argument seriously, which would imply that all humans were rational, then everyone would solely donate to the SIAI. If everyone only donated to the SIAI, would something like Wikipedia even exist? I suppose the SIAI would have created Wikipedia if it was necessary. I'm just wondering how much important stuff out there was spawned by irrational contributions and how the world would look like if such contributions would have never been made. I'm also not sure how venture capitalist growth funding differs from the idea to diversify one's contributions to charity.
Note that I do not doubt the correctness of Landsburg's math. I'm just not sure if it would have worked out given human shortcomings (even if everyone was maximally rational). If nobody was to diversify, contributing to what seems to be the most rational option given the current data, then being wrong would be a catastrophe. Even maximally rational humans can fail after all. This wouldn't likely be a problem if everyone contributed to a goal that could be verified rather quickly, but something like the SIAI could eat up the resources of the planet and still turn out to be not even wrong in the end. Since everyone would have concentrated on that one goal (no doubt being the most rational choice at the moment), might such a counterfactual world have been better off diversifying its contributions or would the SIAI have turned into some kind of financial management allocating those contributions and subsequently become itself a venture capitalist?
It's consistent with Landsburg's analysis that everyone has their own utility function that emphasizes what that particular person considers important. So if everyone were a Landsburgian and donated only to a single charity, they would still donate all over the map to different charities - because, even if they all knew about SIAI, they either wouldn't care as much about SIAI's goals as other goals, or they would estimate SIAI's effectiveness in reaching those goals as very low. There probably would still be adverse impact to many charities which are second-choice for most their donors - and I'm sure there are many such - but not as catastrophic as you're outlining, I think.
Personally, I believe that if everyone was presented with Landsburg's argument, most people would fail to be Landsburgians not because they couldn't stomach the math, or because they'd be wary of the more technical assumptions I wrote about in my post, but simply because they wouldn't agree to characterize their charitable utility in unified single-currency utilons.