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JoshuaZ comments on Not By Empathy Alone - Less Wrong
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Comments (108)
This seems like a bad idea. If the overall level of empathy is reduced, the result won't be more efficient charity, the result will less charity. Having money go to support the cute abused puppies is orders of magnitude less useful than having it go to say Village Reach, but it is still probably better than the money going to a lot of status symbols like gold necklaces, fancy cars, and the like.
-_- It's too bad that I didn't just post most of a paper arguing the contrary, and carefully copied out every single citation to make it that much easier for LWers to follow the references.
(I don't know why I bother sometimes.)
The studies in question showed that charity could be increased by means other than empathy. They don't as far as I can tell go in the direction of showing that people will give the same amount of charity when there's no empathy.
'Reduce X and you reduce Y'.
'But Y is increased by other mechanisms like Z, and sometimes quite substantially!'
'That doesn't matter "as far as I can tell".'
That's not the argument. I agree that there are other mechanisms that can influence giving rates and that there are quite a few of them, some of which seem to swamp empathy in controlled conditions. The issue is whether empathy is a mechanism which impacts giving rates. These studies don't seem to answer that effectively.
Read what you wrote:
Even if I grant you that empathy matters at all for giving, because of those other mechanisms influencing the level of charity, the net effect is still indeterminate.
Sections 4 & 5 are the relevant ones here; the net effect of empathy is unclear - if it were removed, it's not clear that the removal of the related biases etc would not compensate.
The net is indeterminate for reducing empathy and using these other techniques to trigger more giving. Actually, in that sort of context, I suspect given this literature that the total giving will likely go up. But that didn't seem to be what you were advocating. If it is what you are advocating then I misread your remark.
Charity is a status symbol. Especially inefficient and extravagant charity.