e.g., Betty could cause one more girl to have a mentor either by volunteering as a Big Sister or by donating money to the Big Sisters program.
In the case where she volunteers and mentors the girl directly, it takes lots of bits to describe her influence on the girl being mentored. If you try to stick to the actions->consequences framework for understanding her influence, then Betty (like a gamer) is engaging in hundreds of actions per minute in her interactions with the girl—body language, word choice, tone of voice, timing, etc. What the girl gets out of the mentoring may not depend on every single one of these actions but it probably does depend on patterns in these micro-actions. So it seems more natural to think about Betty’s fine-grained influence on the girl she’s mentoring in terms of Betty’s personality, motivations, etc., and how well she and the girl she’s mentoring click, rather than exclusively trying to track how that’s mediated by specific actions. If you wanted to know how the mentoring will go for the girl, you’d probably have questions about those sorts of things—“What is Betty like?”, “How is she with kids?”, etc.
In the case where Betty donates the money, the girl being mentored will still experience the mentoring in full detail, but most of those details won’t be coming directly from Betty so Betty’s main role is describable with just a few bits (gave $X which allowed them to recruit & support one more Big Sister). e.g., For the specific girl who got a mentor thanks to Betty’s donation, it probably doesn’t make any difference what facial expression Betty was making as she clicked the “donate” button, or whether she’s kind or bitter at the world. Though there are still some indirect paths to Betty influencing fine-grained details for girls who receive Big Sisters mentoring, as the post notes, since the organization could change its operations to try to appeal to potential donors like Betty.
e.g., Betty could cause one more girl to have a mentor either by volunteering as a Big Sister or by donating money to the Big Sisters program.
In the case where she volunteers and mentors the girl directly, it takes lots of bits to describe her influence on the girl being mentored. If you try to stick to the actions->consequences framework for understanding her influence, then Betty (like a gamer) is engaging in hundreds of actions per minute in her interactions with the girl—body language, word choice, tone of voice, timing, etc. What the girl gets out of the mentoring may not depend on every single one of these actions but it probably does depend on patterns in these micro-actions. So it seems more natural to think about Betty’s fine-grained influence on the girl she’s mentoring in terms of Betty’s personality, motivations, etc., and how well she and the girl she’s mentoring click, rather than exclusively trying to track how that’s mediated by specific actions. If you wanted to know how the mentoring will go for the girl, you’d probably have questions about those sorts of things—“What is Betty like?”, “How is she with kids?”, etc.
In the case where Betty donates the money, the girl being mentored will still experience the mentoring in full detail, but most of those details won’t be coming directly from Betty so Betty’s main role is describable with just a few bits (gave $X which allowed them to recruit & support one more Big Sister). e.g., For the specific girl who got a mentor thanks to Betty’s donation, it probably doesn’t make any difference what facial expression Betty was making as she clicked the “donate” button, or whether she’s kind or bitter at the world. Though there are still some indirect paths to Betty influencing fine-grained details for girls who receive Big Sisters mentoring, as the post notes, since the organization could change its operations to try to appeal to potential donors like Betty.