= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
CarlShulman comments on You're Calling *Who* A Cult Leader? - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (112)
And that you care only about the benefits you confer, not the log of the benefits, or your ability to visualize someone benefited by your action, etc.
I don't see how either of these affect this result - unless you're saying it's easier to visualise one person with clean water and another with a malaria net than it is two people with clean water?
The sum of the affect raised is greater.
I don't understand I'm afraid, can you unpack that a bit please? Thanks.
Consider scope insensitivity. The amount of "warm fuzzies" one gets from helping X numbers of individuals with a given problem does not scale even remotely linearly with X. Different actions to help with distinct problems, however, sum in a much closer to linear fashion (at least up to some point).
Ergo, "one person with clean water and another with a malaria net" feels intuitively like you're doing more than "two people with clean water".
Well, not when you compare them against each other, but only when each is considered on its own: it's like this phenomenon.
I think it means: the sum of the feel-good points of giving one person clean water and another a malaria net will, for most people, be higher than the feel-good points of giving two people clean water.
I'd like to get right whatever it is I'm doing wrong here, so if anyone would like to comment on any problems they see with this or the parent comment (which are both scored 0) I'd be grateful for your input.
EDIT: since this was voted down, but I didn't receive an explanation, I'm assuming it's just an attack, and so I don't need to modify what I do - thanks!
I suspect that the ability to visualize someone benefited by your action is often a proxy for being certain that your action actually helped someone, and that people often place additional value on that certainty. They might not be acting as perfectly rational economic agents in such cases, but I'm not sure I'd call such behavior irrational.