Lumifer comments on What should a college student do to maximize future earnings for effective altruism? - Less Wrong
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Well, let's unpack.
I'll set up the situation with two players. We have Alice, a flesh-and-blood human who is an effective altruist (among other things -- being a human she is not a paperclip maximizer). And we have Charlie the charity, an organization.
Notable differences between Alice and Charlie (besides the obvious ones) are that:
Given this I'll posit that it's probably fine for Charlie to maximize expected outcome and be risk-neutral. It is not fine for Alice to do this.
To formulate this in a slightly different way, it's OK for Alice to give money to Charlie to enable it to act in the maximize-the-expected-outcome manner (e.g. as a philanthropic VC) but it's not OK for Alice to run her entire life this way.