So why do you say that the Folding money would better be spent on starving Africans then? Shouldn't it be donated to the SIAI instead, if you believe it? If not, why not criticize them on the same basis?
Because I am not writing for the tiny cluster of fellow zealots who agree about the high EV of donating to SIAI. I am writing for intelligent people in general, and one of the standard practices of philosophy - and heck, writing in general - is to not make highly controversial claims you do not need to make. I do not have to prove SIAI is the highest EV charity in existence in an essay about Folding@home; I only need to compare to a better charity, to establish a lower bound on how much harm choosing Folding@home does.
Also, "Charity X doesn't optimize under my personal ethics" is not the same as "Charity is not about helping", not that I disagree that signaling is important.
Fine, don't look at my personal ethics. If you asked a random Folding@homer, 'would you be willing to participate in murdering a few people just to make yourself look better', what do you think they would say?
They would say no, but of course everyone "murders" some fraction of a person every day that they don't maximize their life-saving effectiveness. If they were playing video games instead to make themselves feel better, isn't that even "worse"?
People do folding because it's easy and the costs are hidden. If you could magic it out of existence, they wouldn't suddenly start donating equivalent money to maximally-efficient charities.
Latest in an irregular series, some of whose previous entries were Edge.org and the Girl Scouts...
I examine the Folding@home distributed computing project with reference to the costs (electricity resulting in air pollution causing deaths) and benefits (some papers): http://www.gwern.net/Charity is not about helping. Additional data on either side of the cost-benefit is welcome.
(I also recently split out my essay describing things I have changed my mind on.)