Hi!

I found Felicifia after reading Peter Singer's writing for a few years, deciding that utilitarianism and moral realism make sense, making the oh-so-innocuous commitment to attempt to be ethically consistent, and then finding myself sliding into veganism, donating significantly to effective charities¹, and so on.

I'm yet another computer scientist, am originally from England, and work on software for One Laptop Per Child here in Boston. I haven't decided whether that's a preference or an obligation yet.

Cheers,

- Chris.

¹: http://blog.printf.net/articles/2010/11 ... ing-thanks

Welcome aboard, Chris

Looking at your list of charities, it doesn't seem like you're familiar with Giving What We Can ('s recommendations)?

Also, I don't usually agree with Steven Landsburg, but I can't fault his argument about giving all your donations to one cause (except that obviously new information might change your view of which cause is better).

Hi Arepo,

You're right, I hadn't seen Giving What We Can's recommendations. Sounds like I should postpone completing the donations I listed while I read about it. Thanks!

I've only just finished reading the Landsburg article, but it doesn't make much sense to me yet. It seems like he correctly describes the diversification motivation for wanting to choose multiple charities -- wanting to make sure that you're doing good even if, say, your Oxfam donation gets eaten up in overhead or a failed program and doesn't actually save any lives, in a way you couldn't have predicted given your incomplete information -- and then wanders off into talking about playing golf too much instead of giving a concrete objection to the strategy. Yes, of course if I *knew* that Oxfam would do the best things with my money then I'd give it all to Oxfam, but I don't. The fact that I want to spread my bets in the face of uncertain information is unrelated to his arguments about wanting to tick off as many boxes as I can in order to increase the number of "accolades" I get¹, or believing that I've "cured fistula" by donating enough money for a fistula operation, which would be ridiculous.

Also, I guess I don't find his explanation of why he doesn't just decide that Microsoft is "the best stock" and put all of his money into it compelling at all. He says that people who invest in MSFT decide that they're covered as far as tech stocks go and move on to a different area, but even that's not really true -- I don't know anyone, self included, who is invested in only one high-tech company. That would be a pretty foolish lack of diversification in itself. Does his portfolio consist of one stock per industry?

So, bit of a rant there, sorry about that. I think that Landsburg started with a very interesting point -- that, given complete knowledge about what your money is going to be used for, you should not choose multiple targets without a good consequentialist reason for doing so (such as the obvious example of one charity needing *less* money to mostly-ameliorate a problem than the amount you have available to give) -- and then failed to make a principled argument about how to act in the face of incomplete knowledge.

Would be curious to hear what other people think. Thanks.

¹: you know, if people actually *did* receive accolades for giving significantly, instead of just hostile cynicism about how they didn't donate enough or donated to too few or too many causes, I think we'd be able to get a lot more done..

When you invest, you do so in such a way as to maximize the expected utility. Expected utility won't be the same as how much money you have. For example, doubling your money isn't as good as going broke is bad. As such, something where you have a 50% chance of doubling your money and a 50% chance of going broke has a negative expected utility, even if the expected amount of money is zero.

With charity, expected utility is expected utility. As such, none of that applies.

If you're completely willing to get rid of your loss aversion, consider this: If, over your whole life, you do nothing, that does not result in zero net utility. It results in something like a trillion QALYs (quality-adjusted life years). You do what you do not to produce 1000 QALYs, but to make the total 1,000,000,001,000 QALYs. As such, unless you're dealing with something that might accidentally erase history, there's nothing so bad as to result in nothing. You might be gambling with everything you produce, but in the scheme of things, you're gambling with chump change. You wouldn't put all your money in something that had a 51% chance of doubling and a 49% chance of losing it, but if you were dealing with one dollar, and you had a billion dollars that you couldn't invest, then it would be worth it.

Thanks for the reply. Yes, I admit that I still feel some loss aversion, although your argument makes sense.

I still think the consequentialist argument for donating to one charity is fairly weak. Have you considered the possibility that, when someone describes the several charities that they donated to, one charity will be more interesting to their readers than the others, and this might (we'd expect) be a different charity per-reader? Fistula is a good example of this for me, because I only found out about its existence as a medical problem a few years ago, and it was enraging to learn about a problem that so drastically reduces the happiness of a life, and that we would simply never see in the developed world. By having some support for the Fistula Foundation on my charity list, hopefully I'm encouraging other people to have the same reaction I had, and perhaps this emotional reaction sparks giving more than a blog post saying "hey, give all of your money to a deworming charity" does.

On the other hand, *then* we're deep into taking advantage of human emotion and irrationality rather than attempting to persuade people to become more rational, so that has its own disadvantages.

Thanks, plenty of food for thought here.

What about the argument do you find weak?

Do you think that donating to one charity fails to maximize expected utility, or that maximizing expected utility isn't your goal?

It's perfectly reasonable to suggest multiple charities if people won't always judge their values to be the same. The only thing irrational is that, in theory, any rational person would have the same reaction to the same charity.

By having some support for the Fistula Foundation on my charity list, hopefully I'm encouraging other people to have the same reaction I had, and perhaps this emotional reaction sparks giving more than a blog post saying "hey, give all of your money to a deworming charity" does.

This is possible, but the converse possibility is that it encourages others to give to all these charities (or worse, pick one of the less efficient ones) when they might have been willing to follow your lead and give to the one you recommend.

There's also a distinct possibility, given the huge difference in effectiveness between charities, that even if you persuade 10 people to give money they wouldn't otherwise, you'll still have caused fewer net utilons than you would have done just by giving, alone, to the very best charities. This chart from GWWC, listing some of the best causes, gives some sense of the variability:



(source page: http://www.givingwhatwecan.org/resources/health.php)

DanielLC wrote:Do you think that donating to one charity fails to maximize expected utility, or that maximizing expected utility isn't your goal?

I think that donating to one charity implies endorsing one charity, and I suspect that endorsing one charity sometimes fails to maximize expected utility due to human factors.

We know that asking for an amount of money to save one child greatly increases donation levels against asking for the same amount of money to save two children or eight children¹, due to appealing to emotional response. If anything we're doing might predictably cause a lesser emotional response in our readers, even if it has a slightly higher first-order expected utility, I think we should stop and consider our strategy carefully before proceeding. This implies that there's an optimization process going on, whereby we should attempt to maximize the direct expected utility of our donations *and* the emotional impact of our endorsements, in order to maximize the final expected utility of our act.

(Of course, as Arepo argues, this doesn't relieve you of having to come up with greater net utilons at the end.)

¹: http://pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il/~msiritov/ ... tified.pdf

You can endorse multiple charities without actually donating to all of them. Most people won't look closely enough.

From what I've seen, it seems like getting people to donate well is more important than getting them to donate at all. As such, explaining things like why it's best to limit it to one charity would probably help.

Hi Daniel,

DanielLC wrote:You can endorse multiple charities without actually donating to all of them. Most people won't look closely enough.

Sure, but the original thesis certainly wasn't "You should give to just one charity and then lie about it"!

I'm surprised that you would be so willing to consider lying in public -- even if I think the chance of the lie being undetected is 99%, that seems nowhere near acceptable to me. My power to do good is massively reduced if many people think I'm willing to lie whenever it's convenient, and it only takes one person to accuse me of being a liar to have a potentially large effect on many other people. I think consequentialist decision procedures should basically regard lying in public as a matter for emergency circumstances.

DanielLC wrote:From what I've seen, it seems like getting people to donate well is more important than getting them to donate at all. As such, explaining things like why it's best to limit it to one charity would probably help.

Wow, I hadn't considered this. Do you have any citations? From everything I've read of Peter Singer's thoughts, my intuition is that he believes that widening the group of people who donate to an effective NGO is much more important than spending effort on redirecting the donations that are already happening towards exceptionally-effective NGOs. Perhaps someone else (Toby Ord?) has written about this? Thanks for bringing this up.

You don't have to lie. At least not in the traditional sense. Just talk about how these are all good charities and let people draw their own conclusions. They won't blame you when the find out they misinterpreted your comment.

I was thinking it's more important to get people to go from donating to an ineffective NGO to donating to an effective one. All too many people think things like Seeing Eye and the Make-A-Wish Foundation count as charities. If you're trying to get people to donate just with an emotional plea, people who already donate won't feel guilty. You have to get them to realize that it's important to find a charity with a lot of bang for its buck.