Your entire point seems to be that it’s better to give to multiple charities when the joint utility of giving to those charities exceeds the benefit of giving all the money to one charity.
This circumstance exists in the real world for most individuals so infrequently as to be properly ignored. It is extremely unlikely that there is some combination of charities such that giving $5,000 to each of them will generate substantially better returns than giving $10,000 to the best available charity. Unless I’m ignoring important evidence, charities just don’t work together that comprehensively, and non-huge sums of money do not have dramatic enough effects that it would be efficient to split them up.
Also, you chose an incredibly dense and inefficient way to make what seems like a very simple point.
incentives: one should think very carefully before writing any comment that sounds like “this post really ought not to have been written”.
While I don’t necessarily hold that opinion of this particular post, it’s a defensible position. I think that posts that use relatively complicated math where simple English would suffice substantially and negatively affect the quality of discourse. If someone has a OK point to make, it is arguably better that they not make it at all than that they make it in a convoluted manner, because that suggests to other people that it’s OK to make such posts. It’s certainly better that they start it out in the discussion section so that it turns into a more comprehensible post on the main page. Of course, the more original or interesting their actual idea, the more the benefits outweigh the costs.
Your different thinking styles criticism is absolutely on point though, I admit, assuming it actually applies.
Off the top of my head, one charity might be worse overall but might need a small amount of funding to attempt an experimental strategy aimed at improving it. If the likelihood of finding a better way than the most efficient charity pursues is high enough, then small funding to the experimental charity and the rest of your donation to the other could be optimal.
In general I am uneasy with suggestions that one should focus all their charitable energy in one direction, because people are far too prone to finding a local maximum then ceasing exploration for higher maximums.
one charity might be worse overall but might need a small amount of funding to attempt an experimental strategy aimed at improving it.
If this were true, that would mean that that charity had extremely high but rapidly diminishing marginal returns, in which case you should give it money until those diminishing MRs brought it below your next best option. I’m pretty confident that diverse investment is only proper where charities exhibit interactive returns (which is probably extremely rare for most people’s value of charitable contributions) or whether you are trying to maximize something other than effective charity.
I agree; I’d be quite surprised if it were at all common for separate charities working in the same field to be so well-balanced in scale that proportional contributions to both outweigh contributions to just one. Since there’s no clear feedback mechanism to help people maximize expected utility in giving, there’s no reason to expect the MUs to be anywhere close. Therefore we should strongly expect that a “bullet” strategy will outperform diversification. I dub this the Inefficient Charity Markets Hypothesis.
On the other hand, I wonder what percentage of charity contributions are given by the top 1% of donors, people who really can make a dent in these problems? Their impact probably dwarfs anything the vast majority of small donors in the audience would do. But I’d bet they’re smart enough to realize this stuff doesn’t apply to them.
Your entire point seems to be that it’s better to give to multiple charities when the joint utility of giving to those charities exceeds the benefit of giving all the money to one charity.
This circumstance exists in the real world for most individuals so infrequently as to be properly ignored. It is extremely unlikely that there is some combination of charities such that giving $5,000 to each of them will generate substantially better returns than giving $10,000 to the best available charity. Unless I’m ignoring important evidence, charities just don’t work together that comprehensively, and non-huge sums of money do not have dramatic enough effects that it would be efficient to split them up.
Also, you chose an incredibly dense and inefficient way to make what seems like a very simple point.
In general, I would caution against criticisms of this form for several reasons:
different thinking styles: what seems unnecessarily convoluted to one person may seem utterly natural to another;
hindsight bias: something may appear simple after you’ve worked it out, but that doesn’t mean that working it out was easy while you were doing it;
incentives: one should think very carefully before writing any comment that sounds like “this post really ought not to have been written”.
While I don’t necessarily hold that opinion of this particular post, it’s a defensible position. I think that posts that use relatively complicated math where simple English would suffice substantially and negatively affect the quality of discourse. If someone has a OK point to make, it is arguably better that they not make it at all than that they make it in a convoluted manner, because that suggests to other people that it’s OK to make such posts. It’s certainly better that they start it out in the discussion section so that it turns into a more comprehensible post on the main page. Of course, the more original or interesting their actual idea, the more the benefits outweigh the costs.
Your different thinking styles criticism is absolutely on point though, I admit, assuming it actually applies.
Off the top of my head, one charity might be worse overall but might need a small amount of funding to attempt an experimental strategy aimed at improving it. If the likelihood of finding a better way than the most efficient charity pursues is high enough, then small funding to the experimental charity and the rest of your donation to the other could be optimal.
In general I am uneasy with suggestions that one should focus all their charitable energy in one direction, because people are far too prone to finding a local maximum then ceasing exploration for higher maximums.
If this were true, that would mean that that charity had extremely high but rapidly diminishing marginal returns, in which case you should give it money until those diminishing MRs brought it below your next best option. I’m pretty confident that diverse investment is only proper where charities exhibit interactive returns (which is probably extremely rare for most people’s value of charitable contributions) or whether you are trying to maximize something other than effective charity.
I agree; I’d be quite surprised if it were at all common for separate charities working in the same field to be so well-balanced in scale that proportional contributions to both outweigh contributions to just one. Since there’s no clear feedback mechanism to help people maximize expected utility in giving, there’s no reason to expect the MUs to be anywhere close. Therefore we should strongly expect that a “bullet” strategy will outperform diversification. I dub this the Inefficient Charity Markets Hypothesis.
On the other hand, I wonder what percentage of charity contributions are given by the top 1% of donors, people who really can make a dent in these problems? Their impact probably dwarfs anything the vast majority of small donors in the audience would do. But I’d bet they’re smart enough to realize this stuff doesn’t apply to them.
Or they’ve never heard Landsburg’s argument anyway!