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But aren't you making an assumption here that I have full, transparent knowledge of both the short-term and long-term efficiency of charity X and Y? The divers
by maxbrown 12y ago
But aren't you making an assumption here that I have full, transparent knowledge of both the short-term and long-term efficiency of charity X and Y?
The diversification buys me reduced risk of concentrated failure, I would assume just the same in philanthropy. If I give 100% of my donation to one organization, and it turns out they "perform" worse than I expected, it may have been better to split my donation among multiple organizations all of whom I expect to be highly efficient but cannot necessarily predict. Particularly in cases of multi-millions or billions when, even split, the money will meet a minimum threshold to make a difference.
- nialo 12y agoThat's an excellent description of trading reduced expected return for reduced variance actually means. What you seem to be saying is that your utility function isn't actually linear in lives saved, but is instead slightly concave or perhaps has a step change where the utility goes from 0 for lives < n to some positive number for lives > n (for some relatively small n).