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gjm comments on Money: The Unit of Caring - Less Wrong
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Have you ever noticed that wealthy people often leave money to charity in their wills? It would make sense from a utility standpoint to donate while alive because you can be more involved in the use of your money and ultimately gain the appreciation/satisfaction/utils from the result. You gain no utils when dead and I'm assuming that the prospect of future utility is less valuable than the act of donation in the present. Therefore, why do so many people donate to charity in their wills? A big reason is time. They often don't have time (as perceived by them) to research what they want to give to and therefore just leave it up to someone else. In a sense, it's paying someone to figure out what you care about and then having them donate for you. Another reason is the value many rich people place on money. You call it hit points but to some people it literally feels like lifeblood. In order to make a lot of money, it helps to have this attitude. If they were happy to spend their money (because they care) then they wouldn't be wealthy, would they? There is also the opposite effect where spending money loses all value when all you do is spend it. The only thing that seems valuable is another limited resource, time for example.
However, it's not necessarily an issue of caring but of clarifying what the money buys. If you spend $5 on a burrito you know you are getting a burrito. If you spend $2000 on a diamond ring you are buying...love? The main reason that rich people don't give to charity while they are alive is uncertainty. If they could be sure that their money was going to help a cause that mattered to them then they would be more apt to spend it. That's not such a bold claim. I think that the model of a rational, centralized, data driven charity ala The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is an obvious next step in helping people "care". As far as diamond rings for the SO goes...I have no idea.
Surely people who give money to charity in their wills are giving to specific charities, so they have already decided who gets the money. They could have given the money to the same charity instead of writing "When I die, $X goes to charity Y" in their wills.
I'd have thought more obvious explanations for the fact that people give money to charity in their wills are (1) that they want the money available as long as they're alive and might need it, so they don't give it up until it's demonstrably not going to help them, and (2) that they want to demonstrate how generous they are without being seen to boast.
(#1 may not make much sense in the case of the very rich. #2 doesn't make much sense for anyone since reputation isn't much use once you're dead. But that doesn't stop them being motivations, human nature being the overgeneralizing thing it is.)
2) as stated demonstrates a persistent problem i see here and elsewhere: just because a behavior signals something to observers does not mean the behavior was chosen because it signals something to observers.
we use the same evaluative criteria to assess ourselves as we use to determine the relative value of our peers. for example, if i evaluate the relative worth of members of my peer group within the context of ''athletics'' using a criterion like their vertical leap, i will likely apply the same evaluative criterion to myself when assessing -my- value. when i spend hours alone at the gym doing plyometric training to improve my vertical leap i am not signalling, or improving myself with the intention of signalling something later on: i am just doing something that will let me score higher on the metric i use to evaluate my worth. it will make me more estimable in my own eyes and i will get a kick from internal self-approval.
Er, I didn't say that the behaviour was chosen because it signals something. I offered that as one possible explanation.
In this instance, signalling-to-self seems like about as good an explanation as signalling-to-others for the fact that people give to charities at all (though I'm sure these are nothing like the whole explanation). But it doesn't work for explaining why someone would do it in their will rather than earlier, whereas signalling-to-others does.
For what it's worth, I think my #1 is likely more important than my #2. I would hazard a guess that, e.g., Robin Hanson might disagree. But I'm not sure what your objection is: do you think "signalling" explanations are never an interesting part of the story?