Being tactfully noncommittal about your own beliefs until you've scoped out the lay of the land is a learnable skill.

Unfortunately, it's actually not the most important component. In many communities, it's the shibboleths that will trip you up... things the community tacitly expects all right-thinking people to already have a familiarity with. It's possible to spin one's ignorance of such things as an unfortunate personal deficit that one is eager to have corrected, and that can often overcome the barriers to entry... but it's a lot of work.

(I realize that this reveals a potential bias on my part regarding a correlation between intelligence and a liberal bent).

I wouldn't expect an intelligent conservative to posit this:

the reason it had not been cleaned up already was a conspiracy on the part of President Obama

So I don't see a bias if that idea shocked you (unless I share your bias). On the other hand, if you expected this:

"Oil companies shouldn't be allowed to make a mess they can't clean up." or "Shouldn't we invest in clean energy?"

simply because they were intelligent, then maybe there's a bias there.

As for the answer to the question that you asked, I agree with TheOtherDave and knb (not that I disagree with multifoliaterose either). Recognise that there is more variety of opinion, even among people who seem intelligent, than you previously realised, and the only way to find out what people believe is to talk to them.

I'd like to play it. This could work by email, turn-based. All players could move simultaneously on each turn.

At the risk of provoking defensiveness I will say that it really sounds like you are trying to rationalize your preferences as being rational when they aren't.

I say this because the examples that you were giving (local food kitchen, public radio), when compared to truly efficient charities (save lives, improve health, foster local entrepreneurship), are nothing like "save 9 kids + some other benefits" vs. "save 10 kids and nothing else". It''s more like "save 0.1 kids that you know are in your neighborhood" vs. "save 10 kids that you will never meet" (and that's probably an overestimate on the local option). Your choice of a close number is suspicious because it is so wrong and so appealing (by justifying the giving that makes you happy).

The amount of happiness that you create through local first world charities is orders of magnitude less than third world charities. Therefore, if you are choosing local first world charities that help "malnourished" kids who are fabulously nourished by third world standards, we can infer that the weight you put on "saving the lives of children" (and with it, "maximizing human quality-adjusted life years") is basically zero. Therefore, you are almost certainly buying warm fuzzies. That's consumption, not charity. I'm all for consumption, I just don't like people pretending that it's charity so they can tick their mental "give to charity" box and move on.

I think my procrastination started this way years ago, but over time it turned into a vicious cycle of anxiety-inducing/induced procrastination that basically had nothing to do with the model described in the post. I was fully aware that websurfing was an anaesthetic that did nothing to recharge my mental batteries but simply kept me from thinking anxiety-provoking thoughts. Eventually I resorted to anxiolytics, and now I can say no to myself with relative ease.

Well if you get right down to it, feeling guilty only makes it worse. You should just not have the goal in the first place.

The point is that listening to a radio station should be significantly below saving lives on your list of goals.

"saving children" is not necessarily our only goal

Unless you have a huge "they are in another country" discount on children's lives, or a huge "they are in my community" boost to the other goals, I can't name any goals off the top of my head that can compete with saving children's lives.

I just had a conversation with my father on this subject which significantly clarified my thinking, and resolved most of my internal dilemma. The argument put forward in this post is correct, but there is one significant problem. I care about more than just saving children. I also care about how efficiently it is done, what peripheral good a charity is doing in the community by, say, employing locals, and any number of other things. "Children saved" is an important metric and should absolutely be considered, and it is a decision that should be made carefully, but it is not the only metric to consider. We should spend our money efficiently, but we first need to clarify our goals in order to do so, and "saving children" is not necessarily our only goal, even in cases where it is primary.

I find I run into a conundrum on this question, because there is a bias I fear overcompensating for. I know as a human that I am biased to care more about the one person standing in front of me than those ten thousand people starving in India that I'll never meet, but I find it difficult to apply that information. I know that donating money to, say, those malaria nets, will probably save more lives than donating to, say, my local food pantry. By these arguments, it seems that that fact should trump all, and I should donate to those malaria nets.

However, I know that my local food pantry is an organization that feeds people who really need food, that it has virtually no overhead, and that there are children who would be malnourished without it. I also know that there are people all over the world who will contribute to malaria nets, but it is highly unlikely that anyone outside my community will contribute to my local food pantry.

I agree that it is vitally important to think carefully about how we spend our charity money, and I understand that the difficulty I am having with this topic is an indication that I need to think more deeply on it, but I keep coming up against two basic issues.

• There is no simple metric for "most good done." What if one disease costs little to prevent death, but leaves survivors crippled, while another costs much more to prevent death but leaves people healthy? Should I donate to the first, and burden the communities with many cripples, or to the second, and let people die? With food and medical care costing more in the developed world, should I only donate to help those in the undeveloped world, where my dollar will go farther?

• Should I feel guilty for donating money to public radio because it doesn't save children? No. My purpose in donating money to public radio is to keep my favorite shows on the air, and my donations do that very efficiently. Yes, the money could go to save children, but so could the money I use to pay my cable bill. I should perhaps not consider it as charity the way I do a donation that saves children, but I should not feel guilty. If I have $500 allocated for entertainment and $500 allocated for charity, perhaps it should come out of the former. However, it would be disingenuous to say that donations for more frivolous causes, such as saving artwork, could be donated to better causes, such as malaria nets, unless we also point out that what we spent on our fancy dinner or our new dress or going to the movies could also be thus allocated.