Previously in series:  Helpless Individuals

Steve Omohundro has suggested a folk theorem to the effect that, within the interior of any approximately rational, self-modifying agent, the marginal benefit of investing additional resources in anything ought to be about equal.  Or, to put it a bit more exactly, shifting a unit of resource between any two tasks should produce no increase in expected utility, relative to the agent's utility function and its probabilistic expectations about its own algorithms.

This resource balance principle implies that—over a very wide range of approximately rational systems, including even the interior of a self-modifying mind—there will exist some common currency of expected utilons, by which everything worth doing can be measured.

In our society, this common currency of expected utilons is called "money".  It is the measure of how much society cares about something.

This is a brutal yet obvious point, which many are motivated to deny.

With this audience, I hope, I can simply state it and move on.  It's not as if you thought "society" was intelligent, benevolent, and sane up until this point, right?

I say this to make a certain point held in common across many good causes.  Any charitable institution you've ever had a kind word for, certainly wishes you would appreciate this point, whether or not they've ever said anything out loud.  For I have listened to others in the nonprofit world, and I know that I am not speaking only for myself here...