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.

You might try here:

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

Christina is talking about the atheist movement, not the set of all atheists ("atheist" is used there as a shorthand for "member of the movement;" maybe we need different words?).

Yes, I think it's a very poor choice of words to conflate a philosophical position with a set of people publicly arguing for it (and for other things as well).

And I'm not even sure we can properly say that there is an atheist movement. There are a few prominent atheists (Dawkins, Harris, Myers, etc.), plus various bloggers, who speak at atheist conventions, but atheists as a whole are not organized, and they have a variety of positions on many relevant topics (religious tolerance, personal liberties, etc.)

In contrast, IIUC, the LGBT movement is more organized, and, while not universally representative, has more support among the queer people. I suppose that most queer people largely agree on issues such as sexual rights, adoption rights, family rights, etc. After all, being queer refers to pattern of preferences and behaviors, while being an atheist refers to an epistemic state.

And if you're talking about a movement, then a call to be more inclusive is not a non sequitur at all.

It's not a non sequitur, but I don't think it's good advice. Intellectual honest discourse should be, IMHO, blind to gender, race, ethnicity, sexual preferences, and other group differences (unless these happen to be the topic of the discourse, of course). Affirmative action has no place in it.