Many folks here are familiar with the argument for donating to a single charity over spreading one’s donations among multiple charities. This argument trades on the difference between the marginal impact of money spent on myself and money spent on sufficiently big organizations. Whereas my tenth Ferrari doesn’t give me nearly as much pleasure as my first did, a dollar donated to Vegan Outreach prevents (in expectation) a constant amount of suffering, regardless of how many dollars I have already donated.

I think this argument has wider implications for utilitarians and effective altruists. In particular, it seems to imply that altruistically motivated folk should be spending most of their time engaged in just one activity, as opposed to the diversity of pursuits that characterize the life of a self-interested individual. We can express the challenge as follows: if spending 30 minutes doing something is a cost-effective use of your time, why isn’t spending 8 hours doing that same thing also cost-effective?

True, sometimes our time, even if spent altruistically, has significant diminishing marginal utility, maybe because we work on “micro-projects” that require little time, after which their cost-effectiveness drops precipitously. (These projects may be analogous to a very small charity that quickly runs out of room for more funding, so that even a single donor can hit diminishing marginal returns eventually.) However, it doesn’t seem that a large number of the projects utilitarians and effective altruists work on are of this nature. At the very least, the claim would have to be supported by an explicit argument to become minimally credible.

Here’s another way of resisting the conclusion. Of all the different ways in which we can have a positive impact on the world, some involve effects that “flow through” ourselves, whereas others involve effects that affect the world directly. For example, I may decide to spend a few hours per week exercising because I believe exercise will increase my energy, as a result of which I’ll end of up doing more good in the world. Now it seems that to the degree that my ability to ultimately affect the universe is mediated by my doing things that proximately affect myself, this might provide a reason for thinking that diversification of activities may be justified. However, this argument can at best justify diversification only for that proportion of activities that have this property. And there are no apparent reasons for supposing that this property is shared by a large fraction of our activities.

When I reflect on this, it’s hard for me not to reach the conclusion that, to do more good, I should be spreading my time over fewer activities. I also have the impression that this is true of most of the utilitarians and effective altruists I know.

I assume you’re talking exclusively about activities whose primary goal is altruistic?

If so, I would guess that most of us already do restrict them quite heavily. Most EAs seem to have a preferred lemma of the standard X-risk, poverty, animal welfare, which they get behind in fairly consistent ways. Do you think otherwise?

Arepo wrote:I assume you’re talking exclusively about activities whose primary goal is altruistic?

Yes, that's why the post was addressed to "altruistically motivated folk".

If so, I would guess that most of us already do restrict them quite heavily. Most EAs seem to have a preferred lemma of the standard X-risk, poverty, animal welfare, which they get behind in fairly consistent ways. Do you think otherwise?

Restricting your activities to, say, "promoting animal welfare" might not be restrictive enough, since there are countless ways of doing that, with significant variations in cost-effectiveness. Among these activities, many will have no or negligible diminishing marginal returns. I'd be very surprised if, on expectation, leafleting for Vegan Outrech is as cost-effective as spreading anti-speciesist memes on public forums, or as earning to give, or as euthanizing incapacitated worms. Yet these are all activities whose value is roughly proportional to the time you spend engaged in them. So it's hard to see what could justify distributing one's time across many such activities, as many folks here do (myself included), as opposed to spending all one's time in just one of those activities. Of course, the latter approach might be "alienating", and as such likely to have negative effects on motivation. But it doesn't seem to me that the degree to which we diversify our activities is a cost-effective way of reducing alienation. A better approach might be to "purchase motivation and utilons separately". For example, you could spend most of your time engaged in just one activity, and then treat yourself to something fun, like watching a movie or going on a date.

Sure. I just genuinely believe most EAs - or at the very least most utilitarian EAs already do this.

I believe I'm not understanding you correctly. Can you provide a few examples of EAs, utilitarian or otherwise, who spend all their (altruistically allocated) time engaged in a single activity (defined at the relevant level of granularity), such as rescuing worms, leafleting for Vegan Outreach, spreading memes on public forums, etc? I know many EAs and off the top of my head I can't think of a single person who spends his or her time in that way. The closest would be people like Brian, Gaverick or Matt Wage, who have high-impact, 9-to-5 jobs that occupy most of their time. But even they fail to spend the rest of their hours doing similar kind of stuff, and in any case such cases are very atypical in the EA community.

I was mainly thinking of them, and others in careers chosen for util reasons. Inasmuch as they do other stuff after work, I suspect that's being human rather than misprioritising utilitarian activities. But let's ask Brian...