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juliawise comments on Prediction is hard, especially of medicine - Less Wrong
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Upper middle class and the wealthy do this quite a bit, even in countries with universal healthcare.
Why in the world would I? I don't care very much about other people's grandfathers, why should they care about mine? I'm indirectly willing to kill quite a few people to save my own life or that of my family. Even my friends are each worth more than one life to me, going of revealed preferences.
Also you are forgetting that the purpose of the state is basically to serve the desires of its citizens, it is not a global utility maximizer. That citizens of a country would cooperate for selfish gain is hardly unheard of. Also we care more about people in our in-group more than people in our out-group. Many different people identify these by culture, subculture, company, religion, citizenship, ideology, language, profession, nationality or language.
Poor people in Africa are far. We feel more idealistic and more moral thinking about helping them. We get more brownie points of signalling we wish too or will help them than by helping local poor people. But we are ironically less likley to do anything for their benefit, since that is mostly a near action. We more accurately perceive that local poor people are sometimes nasty but we end up helping them more anyway.
Also when thinking about helping people in far places we are less even likley to be pragmatic about the best way to acheive this. Considering how much we fail even at helping those around us this can be a dispiriting.
You should read "The great Charity Storm". We systematically overspend stupidly on education, healthcare and helping poor people.
Wait, nothing in "The Great Charity Storm" indicates that we overspend on those things. It just says our spending in those areas has increased since 1800, and gives some theories as to why that might be. I would certainly agree that we don't spend money well in those areas, but it's not the quantity that's the problem.
Your statements about what we want to do (care for our in-group, donate to "far" causes to gain status) don't mean anything about what we should do. I recognize that I have little emotional reason to care about people I'll never meet who live very different lives from mine, but I believe it's wrong for them to suffer and die when I could easily prevent that. So I make an effort to think about things that make them feel nearer - their bodies hurt like mine, they protect their children, they make music, they fall in love.
"We're born to think this way" doesn't mean you can't try to change it.
I think it was implied rather strongly by the explanation he offered. I obviously think it plausible if not probable, lest I wouldn't invoke it.
We have evolved strong feeling regarding these activities that are no longer reliable in our modern context. Can you see why this implies we will not only be irrational in our decisions on how much to spend (even in our original context the intuitions where geared towards evolution's utility function not our own) but also in what way we spend on those things.
How familiar are you with the Far vs. Near material on Overcoming Bias? The reason I invoked it was to point out that when thinking in far mode we are more likley to consider such principles very important, yet in near mode much less so. And remember both far and near are shards of desire
Medium-familiar? As a dichotomy, it seems useful if it lets you do things differently because of it. So if you recognize that your far-mode diet isn't working because your food cravings are near, it may be helpful to make more concrete, near-mode steps. Likewise, if your far-mode ideals say that it's wrong for people to die of TB when there's a cheap cure, but you never get around to acting on it or you instead donate to nearer but less efficient causes, doing something to put it in nearer mode might be helpful. As in, "I will look at pictures of people in countries where people die of stupid diseases and remember that they are regular people like me", or "I will donate to an efficient health charity and then have an ice cream sundae." (Though his may interfere with the far-mode diet...)