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Lumifer comments on Open Thread, May 18 - May 24, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Why?
I do not accept that a dollar is a unit of caring.
I do not think that contributing money to an organization which runs programs which statistically save lives can be legitimately called "I saved X lives". Compare: "I bought some war bonds so I can say I personally killed X enemy soldiers".
I think that strutting one's charitable activities is in very poor taste.
What would you use "I saved X lives" to mean if not "compared to what I would have done otherwise, X more people are alive today"?
(I don't at all like the implied precision in giving a specific number, though.)
There are two issues here.
One is tracking of individual contributions. When a charity says "A $5000 donation saves one life" they do not mean that your particular $5000 will save one specific life. Instead they divide their budget of $Z by their estimate of Y lives saved and produce a dollars/life number. This is an average and doesn't have much to do with you personally other than that you were one data point in the set from which this average was calculated.
"I contributed to the common effort which resulted in preventing Y deaths from malaria" is a more precise formulation which, of course, doesn't sound as good as "I saved X lives".
Two is the length of the causal chain. If you, with your own hands, pull a drowning kid out of the water, that's one life saved with the causal chain of length 1. If you give money to an organization which finances another organization which provides certain goods for the third organization to distribute with the help of a bunch of other organizations, the causal chain is long and the longer it goes, the fuzzier it gets.
As always, look at incentives.Charity fundraising is effectively advertising with greater social latitude to use emotional manipulation. One strand in that manipulation is to make the donor feel an direct emotional connection with "direct" being the key word. That's why you have "Your donation saves lives!" copy next to a photo of an undernourished black or brown kid (preferably a girl) looking at the camera with puppy eyes.
If someone is saying "I saved 10 lives" because they gave $500 to a charity that advertises a cost per life saved of $50, then yes, that's very different from actually saving lives. But the problem is that charities' reports of their cost effectiveness are ridiculously exaggerated, and you just shouldn't trust anything they say.
What we want are marginal costs, not average costs, and these are what organizations like GiveWell try to estimate.
Yes, this is real. But we're ok with assigning credit along longish causal chains in many domains; why exclude charity?
Oh, trust me, I don't :-D
The problem with marginal costs is that they are conditional. For example, the marginal benefit of your $1000 contribution depends on whether someone made a $1m contribution around the same time.
I don't know about that -- I'm wary of assigning credit "along longish causal chains", charity is not an exception for me.
Beware, envy lives here. Cloaked in the robes of social decency, he whispers:
“Imposters, all of them. They don’t deserve praise…you do.”
Huh?
If I were you, I would consider the possibility that I am envious of those who signal and receive praise, and that I am rationalizing my feelings by claiming to uphold the social standard of "good taste".
That seems unlikely.
First, even after introspection I don't have envious feelings towards such people which is probably because in my social circle ostentatious displays of kinda-virtue usually lead not to praise but to slight awkwardness.
Second, this is consistent with my general taste in other things and looks to be a pretty ancient attitude :-)
It's not intended as a unit of caring - it's a unit of achievement, a display of power, focused on outcomes. Consequences over virtue ethics, utils over fuzzies.
Don't get me wrong, I do see the ugliness in it. I too have deeply held prejudices against materialism and vanity, and the whole thing bites against the egalitarian instinct for giving even more status to the wealthy. But helping people is something worthy of pride, unlike the mercedes or thousand dollar suits or flashy diamonds and similar trifles people use for the same purpose.
My point is, you said they were signalling. I'm not approving of signalling so much as saying, why not signal productively, in a manner that actually does what you've signaled to do?
Some people think otherwise.
How about buying status signals with the the minor side-effect of helping people?
Of course they do. "So much money, so little taste" is a common attitude. "Unnecessarily large houses" are known as McMansions in the US.