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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Why We Can't Take Expected Value Estimates Literally (Even When They're Unbiased) - Less Wrong
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Leaving aside Aumann questions: If people like that think that the Future of Humanity Institute, work on human rationality, or Giving What We Can has a large probability of catalyzing the creation of an effective institution, they should quite plausibly be looking there instead. "I should be doing something I think is at least medium-probably remedying the sheerly stupid situation humanity has gotten itself into with respect to the intelligence explosion" seems like a valuable summary heuristic.
If you can't think of anything medium-probable, using that as an excuse to do nothing is unacceptable. Figure out which of the people trying to address the problem seem most competent and gamble on something interesting happening if you give them more money. Money is the unit of caring and I can't begin to tell you how much things change when you add more money to them. Imagine what the global financial sector would look like if it was funded to the tune of $600,000/year. You would probably think it wasn't worth scaling up Earth's financial sector.
Can you give an example relevant to the context at hand to illustrate what you have in mind? I don't necessarily disagree, but I presently think that there's a tenable argument that money is seldom the key limiting factor for philanthropic efforts in the developed world.
BTW, note that I deleted the "impossible to overstate" line on grounds of its being false. It's actually quite possible to overstate the impact of adding money. E.g., "Adding one dollar to this charity will CHANGE THE LAWS OF PHYSICS."
What sort of key limiting factors do you have in mind that are untouched by money? Every limiting factor I can think of, whether it's lack of infrastructure or corruption or lack of political will in the West, is something that you could spend money on doing something about.
If nothing else, historical examples show that huge amounts of money lobbed at a cause can go to waste or do more harm than good (e.g. the Iraq war as a means to improve relations with the middle East).
Eliezer and I were both speaking in vague terms; presumably somebody intelligent, knowledgeable, sophisticated, motivated, energetic & socially/politically astute can levy money toward some positive expected change in a given direction. There remains the question about the conversion factor between money and other goods and how quickly it changes at the margin; it could be negligible in a given instance.
The main limiting factor that I had in mind was human capital: an absence of people who are sufficiently intelligent, knowledgeable, sophisticated, motivated, energetic & socially/politically astute.
I would add that a group of such people would have substantially better than average odds of attracting sufficient funding from some philanthropist; further diminishing the value of donations (on account of fungibility).
And one might even be right about that.
A better analogy might be if regulation of the global financial sector were funded at 600k/yr.
That's my gut feeling as well, but can we give a theoretical basis for that conclusion, which might also potentially be used to convince people who can't think of anything medium-probable to "do something"?
My current thoughts are
Anyway, I understand that you probably have reasons not to engage too deeply with this line of thought, so I'm mostly explaining where I'm currently at, as well as hoping that someone else can offer some ideas.