Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics.

• David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

Edit: Yup, apparently that's a famous quote by Bradley which I read for the first time in that book. Good catch.

But although no ideal obliterates the ugly drudgery and detail of any calling, that ideal does, in the case of the soldier or the doctor, exist definitely in the background and makes that drudgery worthwhile as a whole. It is a serious calamity that no such ideal exists in the case of the vast number of trades and crafts on which the existence of the modern city depends.

• G. K. Chesterton

Politics, after all, is the art of persuasion; the political is that dimension of social life in which things really do become true if enough people believe them. The problem is that in order to play the game effectively, one can never acknowledge this: it may be true that, if I could convince everyone in the world that I was the King of France, I would in fact become the King of France; but it would never work if I were to admit that this was the only basis of my claim.

• David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

A couple of days ago, GiveWell updated their top charity picks. AMF is still on top, but GiveDirectly bumped SCI from #2 to #3.

They also (very) tentatively recommend splitting your donation among the three: 70% to AMF, 20% to GiveDirectly, and 10% to SCI. The arguments about this in the blog post and comments are pretty interesting. (But I wouldn't stress too much about it: harder choices matter less).

But our atavistic Red/Blue tribalism...

It's Green/Blue. Noobs.

You've pinpointed it: the only difference is who gets it. When investing, diversification as the receiver of the return is useful because you'd rather gain slightly less than often lose everything. When ... living, diversification as the receiver of the return is useful for the same reason.

When investing, you'd like your buyers to diversify... but there's only one buyer, so that buyer needs to diversify. But when giving charitably, the world would like its buyers to diversify, and there are lots of buyers. Assuming its buyers are sufficiently independent, the world gets enough diversification just because its buyers make different decisions. So as long as sufficiently many people make different charitable giving decisions than you, feel free to buy only what you think are the most efficient charities.

The world doesn't care how much you help it, the world only cares how much it gets helped overall.

Kind of a stupid question:

It's a truism in the efficient charity community that when giving to charity, we should find the most efficient group and give it our entire charity budget; the common practice of spreading donations among groups is suboptimal. However, in investing it's considered a good idea to diversify. But it seems that giving to charity and investing are essentially the same activity: we are trying to get the highest return possible, the only difference is who gets it. So why is diversification a good idea for one and not the other?

A philosophers’ version is the “inverted spectrum”: how do I know you see “red” rather than “blue” when you see this red print?

That's a typo, right? It's blue print.

A continual insistence on predicted experience in the real world, rather than thought-experiments devised to gain information about my own beliefs rather than the state of reality.

While I think your other points have some degree of validity, this one does not. How can we apply evidence to your hypotheses, if we don't know what your hypotheses even are ? It is important to ensure that everyone understands your claims (without necessarily agreeing with them) before we can discuss them. You say that "if patriarchy exists, it doesn't matter what anyone thinks", but we can't determine whether it exists or not until we understand what you mean by the word "patriarchy".

Furthermore, I believe that most people here believe that there does exist some systematic bias in our society that privileges men over women -- though we may disagree about the degree of this bias as well as some other details. But the mere existence of this bias does not automatically render the rest of your points valid.

For example, here are some statements of yours that could turn out to be false even if your beliefs about the exact nature of patriarchy are true:

• Eliminating gender is not only possible, but is also the best way to combat the patriarchy.
• Operant conditioning through guilt is a supremely effective conversion tactic.
• Scientists should suppress any conclusions that could lend support to the patriarchy, even if these conclusions accurately represent reality.
• The user base of Less Wrong is incapable of engaging with you on a purely intellectual level.

You might try here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/atheisthavens