Open Thread, September 15-30, 2012

OpenThreadGuy

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, even in Discussion, it goes here.

then... it's about comparing any given point in that 2-D space with any other point.

Granted, preferring one particular 2D point to another may be read as running a scalar-valued comparison function on the 2D space (such a reading is not without problems, e.g. because real people's preferences may not be transitive, but let's ignore those details). However, from the existence of such a function it does not follow that "we should find the most efficient group and give it our entire charity budget" - this being the claim the universality of which I was contesting.

I've made a post with an analysis of this situation.

5pengvado14y

Agreed. To derive that you would also need a smoothness constraint on said function, so that it can be locally approximated as linear; and you need to be donating only a small fraction of the charity's total budget, so as to stay within the domain of said local approximation. I assert that the smoothness property is true of sane humans' altruistic preferences, but that's not something you can derive a priori, and a sufficiently perverse preference could disagree.

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Open Thread, September 15-30, 2012

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Open Thread, September 15-30, 2012

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