DanielLC comments on Proportional Giving - Less Wrong

10 Post author: gjm 02 March 2014 09:09PM

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Comment author: DanielLC 02 March 2014 11:13:40PM 2 points [-]

If you're an egoist, giving a fixed portion of your income has a fixed cost (since the marginally utility of money is approximately inversely proportional to what you have) and gives you a fixed amount of prestige, or signalling or whatever. That sort of thinking is useful for maximizing inclusive genetic fitness, so it's no surprise that we think that way.

Comment author: gjm 03 March 2014 01:16:07AM 2 points [-]

Does it give a fixed amount of prestige/signalling/whatever? Firstly, it only does so if you're telling the world about your giving (which, e.g., at least one of the ancient traditions featuring "tithing" strongly discourages); secondly, whether reasonably or not, I think you get more prestige from giving away 10% of what you have if you are either very poor (so that doing so really hurts) or very rich (so that it's an impressive-sounding sum that seems like it can do a lot of good).

However, the fact that a fixed fraction of income is kinda like a fixed sacrifice of utility does seem like it might be an important piece of the picture. Somehow.