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RichardKennaway comments on How is the world different if I make a donation? - Less Wrong Discussion

6 Post author: banx 29 December 2014 11:29PM

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Comment author: RichardKennaway 30 December 2014 02:25:46PM 11 points [-]

I'm fairly confused about the above, and haven't succeeded in rigorously defining a satisfying model from which I can compute the expected utility of a donation. My intuition is that the expected value of a donation should work out to the good done by the number of nets that can be purchased and distributed with that amount of money, but I can't justify it.

Suppose they distribute bed nets in batches of D, and your donation can buy K < D nets. There is a probability of K/D that your donation triggers another batch of D nets, hence expected number of nets = (K/D)*D = K. (By a slightly longer argument, this is still true even when K >= D.)

Note that by the same reasoning, cutting 1 minute off your journey to catch a train, when you have no knowledge of the train timetable, has an expected saving of 1 minute on your whole journey, regardless of how frequently the trains run.

Comment author: Capla 30 December 2014 08:04:14PM 2 points [-]

But your calculation changes if you have even a small amount of information about the timetables. Can we get this information from the organizations in question?

Comment author: DanielLC 31 December 2014 12:15:01AM 5 points [-]

You can figure out things in the short term that way, but if you want to know if the marginal money will be used in a year, you'll have to know every project they run in the mean time and how much each will cost. This will include projects that haven't even been planned yet.

This isn't a train that doesn't hold close to its time table. This is a train that leaves when it seems like a good idea. And you're trying to predict the time to within a few minutes weeks ahead of time. You won't even be able to predict which train you'd catch.

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