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DanielLC comments on What's the right way to think about how much to give to charity? - Less Wrong Discussion

10 Post author: irrational 24 September 2014 09:42PM

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Comment author: DanielLC 27 September 2014 12:20:58AM 1 point [-]

True, but my point was that you figure out at what point it's better to donate the marginal dollar, and you donate everything beyond that.

Comment author: [deleted] 03 October 2014 05:05:00PM 0 points [-]

That's tautological, if you absorb all relevant factors into "better to donate". My point was you can't just project your current mind into the recipient's situation and then project how much they would value the dollar.

In addition to this, personal factors such as lack of long-term commitment devices, probability of motivation-breaking also have to be integrated.

On the upside, each additional dollar strenghtenes the market for effective charities, which incentivizes future people to create better and more attractive charities. (This is similar to the way in which marginal veg*anism incentivizes R&D of better and cheaper non-animal products.)

I personally find it near-impossible to factor all of this into one number.

Comment author: DanielLC 03 October 2014 08:27:29PM 1 point [-]

I do not know how much the recipient should keep, but I still think it would be helpful for him to know that it's independent of his current salary. For one thing, it's awfully suspicious for the amount he should keep to be that close to the amount he earns.

Things like motivation-breaking also have to be integrated, but it's not enough to justify keeping 99% of his money. At that point, almost nothing is lost of he loses motivation, so the benefits of greatly increasing donation would seem to easily outweigh the risks.

Comment author: [deleted] 03 October 2014 10:10:06PM *  0 points [-]

By the way, you were implying that giving money to poor Africans is optimal altruism.

This is clearly false.

By doing so, you merely make up for other people's policy failures and create perverse incentives and moral hazards for the causes of poverty. In addition, other people are more likely than you to give money to the poor rather than to abstract causes, which means that you have an intellectual comparative advantage in focussing on those other causes.

I think all of the following are better candidates for hed.utils. than poverty relief:

  • lobbyism (only very narrow topic range)
  • technological and scientific research (again, only a small topic range)
  • liberal eugenics
  • research and advocacy against nonhuman suffering (not many good candidates, but some are better than all povery relief charities)
  • utilitarian munchkin ideas like hedonium or artificial utility monsters
  • singularity and x-risk stuff (again, not many good candidates, but some are better than all poverty relief)
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