Category Archives: 1

Defense theory of diversified giving

Posted on February 24, 2012 | 19 comments

People  tend to give small amounts of money to many charities instead of a lot to one favorite charity.  It has been noted that this is irrational behaviour, assuming one cares mainly about the recipients. It is rational though for people who are purchasing ‘warm fuzzy feelings’ or signals of charitableness. So those are the usual explanations.

This nice experiment, via marginal revolution, suggests another explanation:

Every year, 90% of Americans give money to charities. Is such generosity necessarily welfare enhancing for the giver? We present a theoretical framework that distinguishes two types of motivation: individuals like to give, for example, due to altruism or warm glow, and individuals would rather not give but dislike saying no, for example, due to social pressure. We design a door-to-door fund-raiser in which some households are informed about the exact time of solicitation with a flyer on their doorknobs. Thus, they can seek or avoid the fund-raiser. We find that the flyer reduces the share of households opening the door by 9% to 25% and, if the flyer allows checking a Do Not Disturb box, reduces giving by 28% to 42%. The latter decrease is concentrated among donations smaller than $10. These findings suggest that social pressure is an important determinant of door-to-door giving. Combining data from this and a complementary field experiment, we structurally estimate the model. The estimated social pressure cost of saying no to a solicitor is $3.80 for an in-state charity and $1.40 for an out-of-state charity. Our welfare calculations suggest that our door-to-door fund-raising campaigns on average lower the utility of the potential donors.

Assuming that it is more costly to refuse to give the first dollar than the second, and so on, people give to a lot of charities because they are purchasing ease from social pressure (or whatever you want to call this), and a lot of charities are attacking then with social pressure.

I think this explains some of the trend, but not near all. However I haven’t seen the data for how distributed giving is just on occasions that people seek out charities.

Maybe the campaign for efficient charity can have some effect on this section of givers. It provides a convincing excuse. I don’t feel so bad declining those who solicit donations when I can claim that as soon as they make the top of Giving What We Can or Givewell’s lists I will be morally permitted to consider them. Users of this excuse need not actually donate anything to better charities however.

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There should be more links, but I’m typing on a phone. Turns out to be less awkward than I imagined, except adding links.

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Motivation on the margin of saving the world

Posted on February 8, 2012 | 11 comments

Most people feel that they have certain responsibilities in life. If they achieve those they feel good about themselves, and anything they do beyond that to make the world better is an increasingly imperceptible bonus.

Some people with unusual moral positions or preferences feel responsible for making everything in the world as good as they can make it, and feel bad about the gap between what they achieve and what they could.

In both cases people have a kind of baseline that they care especially about. In the first case they are usually so far above it that nothing they do makes much difference to their feelings. In the second case they are often so far below it that nothing they do makes much difference to their feelings.

Games are engaging when you have a decent chance at both winning and losing. Every move you make matters, so you long to make that one more move. 

I expect the same is true of motivating altruistic consequentialists. I’m not sure how to make achievements on the margin more emotionally salient, but perhaps you do?

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Affecting everything

Posted on December 29, 2011 | 36 comments

People often argue that X is hugely important because it affects everything else. Sleep is so important because it affects your whole day. You should value your health more than anything because you need it for everything else. And your freedom too. And friends, and food. AI is the most important thing to work on because you could use it to get anything else. Same with anything that makes money, or gains power. Also sociology, because it’s about understanding people, and everything else we care about depends on people’s behaviour. And maths, science, and engineering are more important than anything  because they illuminate the rest of the world, which is the most important thing too. Politics is most important because it determines the policies our country runs under, which affect everything. Law is similar. I assume garbage collectors know they are doing the most important thing because without garbage disposal society would collapse.

It turns out an awful lot of things affect everything, and a lot of them affect a lot of things a lot. That something has a broad influence is certainly a good starting criteria for it being important. It’s just a really low bar. It shouldn’t be the whole reason anyone does science or repairs roads, because it doesn’t distinguish those activities from a huge number of other ones. There is more than one thing that affects everything, because the set of things we might care about are not causally organized like a tree, they are organized like a very loopy web of loops.

A segment of a social network

Even the dots on the right affect everything. Image via Wikipedia

Often this ‘affects everything’ criterion is not even used on any relevant margin. It is used in the sense that if you didn’t have sleep or any understanding of humans at all you would be in a much worse situation than if you had these things in abundance. A better question is whether sleeping another half hour or dedicating your own career to sociology is going to make a huge difference to everything. An even better question is whether it’s going to make an even bigger difference to everything than anything else you could do with that half hour or career. This is pretty well known, and applied in many circumstances, but for some reason it doesn’t stop people arguing from the interconnectedness of everything to the maximal importance of whatever they are doing.

Perhaps it is psychologically useful to have an all purpose excuse for anyone doing anything that contributes at all to our hugely interconnected society to feel like they are doing the most important thing ever. But if you really want to do something unusually useful, you’ll need a stronger criterion than ‘it affects everything’.

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On avoiding evidence

Posted on December 23, 2011 | 8 comments

I often look away when I order food from a place where I can see it being prepared, because I expect to see things that will make me doubt my safety dining there. Similarly I prefer to sleep when I am sick, watch loud tv while on airplanes, and buy foods and drinks rather than make them myself where I can see myself making them.

This is all, of course, irrational. If I expect that opening my eyes will show me evidence that will make me believe X, then I already believe X. Or I should, if I am rational and expect to remain so. In these cases I don’t expect to remain rational. I quite reasonably expect that if I receive particular pieces of evidence I will update too much, so I should not believe what I expect to believe in the future, conditional on collecting evidence. I should avoid the evidence.

The ‘avoid evidence’ solution doesn’t seem like a very good one though. If I recognize that updating so much is irrational in time to avoid the evidence, why don’t I just recognize it when I get the evidence, and not update so much?

Perhaps I am just full of irrational fears that I can’t control by my mere will and reasoning. I don’t think that’s quite it though. Intuitively it seems the problem is that while I believe that I will vastly overweight any evidence I get to the effect that my sandwich is dangerous, when I actually see the rashy hand go into the lettuce or whatever it’s hard to judge whether this isn’t perhaps one of the rare occasions when I should be concerned. The specific piece of evidence looks different every time, so it’s hard to convince myself that a novel particular event that looks bad at the moment really fits into the reference class of other evidence that looks bad and isn’t dangerous.

Do other people behave this way? How should they behave instead? How do you fix this?

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Laughing strategy

Posted on December 9, 2011 | 22 comments

People who believe that a certain group of other people deserve higher relative status often refuse to laugh at jokes about that group of people. Unfortunately (for them) this tends to make them look like uptight goody-goodies who don’t have a sense of humor; a group whom almost everyone agrees should have low status. Why not instead focus on making up more jokes about the group whose relative status seems too high? It seems like that should have the opposite effect on the campaigners likability, and so also encourage more people to join that side of the fight. What am I missing?

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