some of them do

I think we're on slightly different semantic grounds here. "Paid likes" is a specific practice, one that we've never engaged in, because it's highly counterproductive to creating an engaged FB community.

Now, are there people we pay who also like our FB posts? Sure. They are the ones who most consistently like them. This is one reason we hired them to work for us. It's a pretty typical thing to do for a nonprofit to hire on volunteers who are passionate about the cause.

getting into effective altruism

I accept that you're skeptical. Here's an example of one of our virtual assistants describing his getting into EA.

We at Intentional Insights don't do paid likes, it wouldn't be very beneficial for building a community to do so. Neither does TLYCS.

Judging by the fact that this post got 500 FB likes the first day it was posted on The Life You Can Save Blog, people are not tuning it out. Note, the baseline for posts on TLYCS blog is about 100-200 likes over their lifetime, not the first day.

That might depend the the kind of insurance. For example, here in California, I am required by law to have personal liability and property damage coverage on my cars. If I take out a loan for a car, the lender will require I have collision and theft as well. So, if I decide I want to drive on public streets, buying insurance -- rational or not -- becomes a part of the cost of owning and operating a vehicle.

In addition to what everyone else said, I recommend Gwern's "Console Insurance". Also, Jacob from Early Retirement Extreme says the following about dental and vision insurance:

I don’t have dental or vision insurance. Paying insurance that covers “regular maintenance” like teeth cleaning or contact lenses which these kinds of insurance do makes no sense whatsoever. Suppose everybody pays $25/month for contacts. Now do you think that everybody paying those $25 through an insurance company will make it any cheaper? No, the insurance company will add a $5 administrative fee—they most definitely will not give away free money. As such this kind of insurance is nothing but a financing plan for people who can’t figure out how to save the money for a $200 dental visit. The point of insurance is to cover rare events with a six-figure cost, which dental or vision simply doesn’t have.

Excellent discussion. This certainly made me think more about donation; however, I believe you are wrong to include the effects of chains in your analysis, for two reasons.

Firstly, I don't see how you can count the benefit of all donations in a chain within the donation of the first donor. Sure, those down the chain may not have been able to donate without the original donor, but it is still them that is having a kidney removed, and they should rightly be able to count that within their own 'charity equivalent' value. Double counting this donation value for two different donors doesn't seem correct.

Secondly, I personally wouldn't want to donate into a chain, as to me it feels like adding additional conditions to the donation - 'I will donate you this kidney, as long as you have a friend who is willing to donate to someone else'. I believe that patients on the waiting list for a kidney should have equal rights to donated kidneys, regardless of whether they have anyone willing to donate for them.

I like to think that those friends or family that were willing to donate, but were not a match, would still be moved to donate altruistically if their loved one received a living donor kidney. Although this then puts the choice of when and how to donate on their own terms. (I'm not aware of any stats or studies on whether this is actually the case or not.)

Finally, as other comments have mentioned, I don't see kidneys and cash as fungible in the same way you do. Whilst most would probably donate the equivalent cost of saving a life to charity rather than undergo major surgery, there is nothing stopping you from doing both, particularly if you employer will cover your time off work at full pay. I think AlexanderB has previously made this point quite well.

Judging by the fact that this post got 500 FB likes the first day it was posted on The Life You Can Save Blog, people are not tuning it out. Note, the baseline for posts on TLYCS blog is about 100-200 likes over their lifetime, not the first day.

Incredible analyses in the comments here.

Somebody That I'll Never Know (Gotye parody) Organ Donation

The earliest reference to the parable that I can find is in this paper from 1992. (Paywalled, so here's the relevant page.) I also found another paper which attributes the story to this book, but the limited Google preview does not show me a specific discussion of it in the book.

It's almost certainly not the actual source of the "parable", or if it is the story was greatly exaggerated in its retelling (admittedly not unlikely), but this may well be the original study (and is probably the most commonly-reused data set in the field) and this is a useful overview of the topic.

Does that help?