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J_Taylor comments on Tell LessWrong about your charitable donations - Less Wrong Discussion
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A common trait amongst humans is the desire to accumulate warm feelings. Optimizing for warm feelings is rarely accomplished by donating to a single charity.
Also, donating to several charities rather than only one offers a different array of signaling benefits.
I don't think he'd post on here in hopes of getting people to donate more so we can all get warm feelings.
I doubt posting here about donating to multiple charities signals anything good.
telling people they get warm feelings by donating to multiple charities is a good way to make more charitable donation happen.
True, but I don't think donations really do much if your goal isn't to do something. Better to donate $1 to the Fred Hollows foundation than to donate $10,000 to the Seeing Eye foundation. (The first gives cataract surgeries for one 20,000th the price the second gives guide dogs.) Also, that wouldn't explain why he implied he gives to multiple charities. It would only explain him suggesting to other people to do it.
How is that the price ratio? Are the cataract doctors all volunteering their time? Are dogs astronomically more expensive than I think they are, or are there no volunteer seeing eye dog trainers to be had...?
The cataract doctors are in third-world countries where labor is cheap.
One could also look at it as hedging one's bets, just as one would (typically) not put all of one's money into one (boy is this getting confusing) stock in the market. Admittedly, charities aren't really the same type of risk.
Question for downvoters: I acknowledge that RobertLumley is making an incorrect point. However, is he so incorrect as to deserve this many downvotes?
I think I'm the victim of some kind of karmassassination here. All recent comments I've made, even largely upvoted ones have been wildly downvoted in the last hour for some reason.
(I've lost about 110 karma in the last hour, all of it on my last 10 or so comments, many of which hadn't been voted on for about a week.)
One wouldn't put all of one's money into one stock in the market because we have decreasing marginal utility towards money. If we didn't and all we wanted was the highest expected value (which is how we should optimize for charity), then we would put our money into the stock that is likeliest to make us the most money.
In other words, I don't want to have a minimum number of lives saved - I want to maximize the number of lives I save.
Perhaps I didn't express my point clearly enough. In fact, I'm certain of it. But I more trying to express that there is some element of risk in a charity. Perhaps there is a probability is corrupt, etc. and isn't as efficient as it's rated as. A better example is likely this:
Assuming it will succeed, the SIAI is pretty unarguably the most important charity in existence. But that's a huge assumption, and it makes some sense to hedge against that bet and distribute money to other charities as well.
But you have no reason to be risk averse about purely altruistically motivated donations. A 50% chance to do some good is just as altruistically desirable as a 100% chance to do half as much good (ignoring changes in marginal utility or including them in "X as much good").
This would not be a good time to hedge one's bets. I was largely asking to correct him if he did something wrong like that.