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Comment by xyzelement | Hacker News Reader

Competence and practicality are severally underrated among many people who believe they are doing good. This belief seems to often short circuit critical thinking and the person ends up diminishing their impact or having an adverse effect.

Examples: Habitat for humanity - for the cost of sending one incompetent american to build a house in the third world, an army of local builders can be hired. If you really want to make impact, donate rather than going in person.

Talented and capable people who end up working low impact non profit jobs at low pay. If you had a real job and donated half your income to the cause, both you and the cause would be better off.

Stupid advocacy. People who get excited about feel good slogans like "cancel rent" without considering impact on the medium and long term supply of housing, and thus end up amplifying the problem they believe they are fixing.

These are just a few examples where not doing the seemingly good/moral thing can be much better than doing it.

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I think this analysis is a bit oversimplified. If your goal is to build houses, then local labour is clearly better. But if it's to recruit lifetime donors, then perhaps shipping out incompetent (but fabulously wealthy) Americans is the way forward.

Similarly for advocacy, our model should perhaps be that seemingly extreme proposals serve to stretch the Overton window before the middle-ground wins out.

Naively disregarding approaches that don't myopically optimise for first-order impact seems likely to have harmful reprocussions.

That said, lots of donations are deeply ineffective, and if you want to prioritize I'd suggest the excellent guides from https://www.givewell.org/ , who reach many of the same conclusions as you do, after more detailed reasoning.

> If your goal is to build houses

Which is the goal of Habitat for Humanity, correct?

> if it's to recruit lifetime donors

Which is not the goal of Habitat for Humanity, right? It's only a means to an end. The end is building homes for people. If that end can be accomplished by a means more efficient than "recruit lifetime donors", shouldn't it be done that way?

But if sending the incompetent American gets you a lifetime donor who pays for many houses to be built (assuming he would not have without the feeling of personal connection he got from his experience incompetently homebuilding), then isn't that the right thing to do if your goal is to build as many houses as possible?

You mentioned efficiency, but the goal was never efficiency - it's to build houses. Would it be better if people were entirely rational and just gave money instead of incompetently homebuilding and then also became lifetime donors? Of course. That's not reality, though.

> if sending the incompetent American gets you a lifetime donor who pays for many houses to be built (assuming he would not have without the feeling of personal connection he got from his experience incompetently homebuilding)

If that is the case, yes. Basically you are saying that, because of a quirk in human psychology, the only way to get people to donate, over the long term, a portion of their income, derived from them doing jobs they are much more productive at than building houses, to building houses, is to engage them by having them build a house themselves first.

The question then becomes, does this actually happen? Do people who volunteer to build homes end up becoming lifetime donors? Or are those two separate sets of people?

Speaking from personal experience, getting involved with volunteer work ensures I always consider those organizations when donating.

Certainly I volunteered because I had strong feelings towards those needs anyway, but those connections make a big difference.

> Basically you are saying that, because of a quirk in human psychology, the only way to get people to donate, over the long term, a portion of their income, derived from them doing jobs they are much more productive at than building houses, to building houses, is to engage them by having them build a house themselves first.

Having people engage in a process isn't just for personal fulfillment of "morally incompetent" people: it also serves as due diligence.

Trust is a big factor of deciding where you want to donate your money. Having walked through the process as a volunteer, you have a much clearer picture of how your donations are spent, and yes you are more likely to donate.

Trust has to be earned one way or another.

Piggybacking on this home building example with an extreme example: how would you feel if you donated for years to some non profit which builds houses, but later learned that child labor is used to build those as well as cheap, structurally unsound materials, with the non profit CEO pocketing millions?

I used to donate a lot, but have lost trust when I've seen reports on how much money is wasted by groups. Now I tend to donate directly to someone or group that I personally know and/or have worked with.

> it also serves as due diligence

Yes, this is a good point. But note that it's a different point from the one that I was responding to. If the purpose of having volunteers build the houses before becoming lifetime donors is due diligence--them gaining trust in the process--then it doesn't matter how efficient they are at building the houses, because the tradeoff is not them building houses vs. whatever more productive work they could have been doing with that time and energy. Nor is it about having to overcome any irrational quirks of human psychology, giving the donors "personal connection", etc. The tradeoff is the donors having trust in the process vs. not--i.e., them gaining the information they need to rationally believe that their donations will accomplish the end goal, vs. not. In short, it's a perfectly rational investment of time and energy for the donors, even if they are terrible house builders.

Donor engagement is a primary driver of donor loyalty and retention. This is pretty fundamental stuff in the nonprofit world. If you can build a deep personal and emotional connection, such as "helping build a house with their own hands", that is a big boost to average lifetime donor value. (Nonprofit donor development can run on decades-long timeframes - engage a high schooler and you're more likely to be able to solicit funds from them in their 50s.)

On a smaller level, this is why many charities will get an initial $5 donation and then spend more than $5 on further solicitation of the same donor. The best indicator that you're going to give money to a charity (or political campaign) is that you've already done so. Lots of people feel this doesn't apply to them personally, but data-driven fundraising bears the point out.

> The best indicator that you're going to give money to a charity (or political campaign) is that you've already done so.

This ignores why you gave the money though. Example, I donated to a particular children's hospital because it was the dying wish of a friend that donations be made to that specific charity instead of sending flowers to the funeral. I don't care about or have a connection to that charity in any other way and I'm not going to dontate to them again but they hound me incessantly for more money.

GP describes a situation I observed working in non profit, not habitat for humanity but something similar.

They didn't have much to show for their efforts but it seems to be a popular strategy. I haven't given them my time or effort since leaving.

> [building houses] is the goal of Habitat for Humanity, correct?

I think that's PART of their goal. They're a Christian organization. "Service" is also a part of their mission, that means having people physically work for/with the needy (and not just give money).

Moreover, much of their work is done domestically where construction labor is NOT cheap. Yes, some things are going to be shoddy, but it's really hard to get a house built and renovated for low cost in the USA. There are challenges not only in finding labor but also general contractors and materials.

Could all the "building of houses" be done more efficiently if Habitat for Humanity was all just finance and management operations? Perhaps, but the service aspect would be missing.

> "Service" is also a part of their mission

The point of the article under discussion is that "service", if it just means "doing stuff yourself" without regard to how productive you actually are--how much you actually help--is a morally incompetent goal. If you have a feeling of service after productively helping someone, that's great. But if you have a feeling of service while the actual impact of what you did was negligible (or even negative), that's bad. So "service" can't be a goal just by itself; it has to be something like "service that actually does help".

"service" definitely can be a goal just by itself - perhaps you can argue that it shouldn't be a goal by itself, but I think that it's undeniable that in certain cases it is a truthful, accurate description of a goal that some people have.

And IMHO the "should" discussion is even not that relevant there because it does not change the values that people actually have. As people say regarding decision theory, "the utility function is not up for grabs"; people's goals are what they are, and if it turns out that someone's goal actually is more about personal service than good results, well, you can't force them to change so let's just facilitate them to get good results while still achieving their core goal, to get a win-win outcome.

It's plausible that their goals might also be achieved just as well without actually productively helping someone - so you might want to nudge them away from that and towards more productive means; but these nudges won't be effective without taking into account what their actual goals are and what types of "service that actually does help" are not valid options because they don't satisfy the goals of the potential helper.

"morally incompetent" yes, but morals are not the primary motivator in that situation, only a secondary factor. People want to feel good about themselves, moral behaviour leads to feeling good. But physical work, pride in your work, connection with your work and the people who benefit from it also make one feel good.

It is basically like mothers' day cake: There is cake on sale that will be far better than what you can bake. But quality isn't the point, connection, pride and individualisation are.

Habitat for Humanity was never just "doing stuff yourself". It is an organized effort with decades of history. They also take donations and hire enough experienced contractors who ensure the work is done to code (I've volunteered before).

The volunteer aspect is there so that people who don't have money but have time can give something. More fundamentally, there's a religious element to the "service" (that's why I put it in quotes). In Christianity, being near the poor and literally serving the poor is very much a spiritual act which is done not ONLY for the benefit of the poor but for the benefit of those who are serving them. This is decidedly NOT morally incompetent. I admit this isn't an ROI which would be seen as valid in the project management book of knowledge, but it's real for the people who believe it.

The OP essay was just a sloppy way for a founder to justify his pivot-- which never actually needed justification.

The actual justification for the pivot was simply the original idea, "Quirk", wasn't ever going to get vc funding and make a 100x - 1000x return. I think it's disingenuous to invoke the concept moral competence for what is ultimately a materialistic decision.

Which is not the goal of Habitat for Humanity, right?

To build more houses they do really need to recruit the lifetime donors. The whole point of the donor's doing some of the work is to get the donations in the first place. It generally is pitched as a team building exercise.

>> If your goal is to build houses

> Which is the goal of Habitat for Humanity, correct?

>> if it's to recruit lifetime donors

> Which is not the goal of Habitat for Humanity, right? It's only a means to an end. The end is building homes for people. If that end can be accomplished by a means more efficient than "recruit lifetime donors", shouldn't it be done that way?

But it can't. You can't hire these hypothetical teams of cheaper local builders when you have no money.

Also, people are forgetting that Habitat for Humanity also builds homes domestically. I've volunteered for one of those jobs, once. My understanding the labor was split between 1) future occupant sweat equity, 2) unskilled volunteer labor (me), 3) volunteer skilled labor (people in building trades).

I knew someone who worked for a similar charity, that sent emergency food to areas where children were starving. They have volunteers run little assembly lines for two hour stretches where they manually mix and pack the food. That work could be easily automated, but if they did that, they'd have no money to buy food for the machines to pack, or to ship it where it's needed. That's because the corporations that sponsor the packing events (where they get most of their revenue) are far more interested in feel-good team-building exercises than actually feeding starving children.

I don't think it's quite so bad with individual donors (who don't have pockets as deep as corporations), but it's quite clear that getting the donors involved increases their engagement significantly. There's a big difference between sending a check and being there than just sending a check.

The focus on first order efficiency is fatally ignorant of actual human psychology.

> seemingly extreme proposals serve to stretch the Overton window before the middle-ground wins out

I've not seen any evidence that this is true, nor that "Overton"-thinking has any evidence as such.

OP's comment is precisely that backreactions to this kind of thinking are often larger than the alleged shifts that are assumed to occur.

NB. The "overton window" is a description of a consensus, not a model; ie., there is nothing of the consensus which is like a dial to be moved.

The reason that people view X as possible is the latent preferences around X, incentives and institutional practices, and their (essentially rational) judgement about the practicalities and possibilities of X.

Eg., Marxism isn't "outside the overton window" by some weird dialogue exclusion. Ironically, it is only in the conversation because of "overton thinking" ie., hype.

It is outside the window because peoples preferences, incentives, and institutional practices are overwhelmingly oriented away from Marxism; which has no practical or evidentiary basis. No social mechanism of implementation. No group of people have the incentives, reasons and power to implement Marxism.

Activism cannot "move the overton window". It provides no reasons, incentives, or power. It changes no institutional practices; it offers no evidence.

"Hype activism" frequently does more harm than good, by reinforcing the status quo.

> Activism cannot “move the overton window”.

The “Overton Window” is a concept developed initially and further elaborated subsequently by a policy think tank, largely as a tool for activists (specifically, that think tank itself) to understand how they can move the social consensus to drive policy.

https://www.mackinac.org/OvertonWindow

Yes, and it's a false model of "policy change".

Your link even, largely, makes this point, to quote:

     Sometimes politicians can move the Overton Window themselves by courageously endorsing a policy lying outside the window, but this is rare. More often, the window moves based on a much more complex and dynamic phenomenon, one that is not easily controlled from on high: the slow evolution of societal values and norms.

It's a description of why politicians will advocate for some policies; it's not a theory of change. (Such a theory would be unevidenced and obviously false).

The quote says "rare", but i'd say, "essentially never". The "slow evolution" is also not really of norms. The public do not "Accept" ideas within some "Window" that you move by "Advocacy".

Almost all "beliefs" are grounded in technological, incentive, preference and practice structures. They are symptoms of much larger mechanistic forces that regulate behaviour (, belief, etc.).

The significant majority of "belief change" is caused by technological and economic change.

Overton window is pretty effective in some ways. Just look at how much of what is taken for granted nowadays as the moral high ground was considered grossly immoral and unthinkable just a generation ago, e.g. gay marriage. This was largely achieved intentionally through media and other forms of social programming. Seems like a win for the Overton window to me.

Attitudes towards same-sex coupling have much to do with birth rate, health and population shocks.

Much of the regulation of sex comes down to population & birth rate fears (this is the history of abortion in America: initially only discouraged because immigrants were outbreeding white people).

The religious origin of anti-samesex prohibitions is just a part of techniques to keep birthrates up (since, historically, 20% of children died before 10).

With massive death rates up until 1940s, it is only in the very modern era that we have the pill & tiny childhood mortality rates.

In this environment our sensitivity to "reporductive freedom" has decreased dramatically, drastically tapering off these prohibitions.

If we were in a pre-40s world of high infant mortality, etc. MANY would regard homosexuality as immoral, precisely because it would seem to limit the size of the future generation (seen, here, as a "misuse of the body to serve the needs of pleasure vs. society").

Activists haven't "moved the window", they are precisely a symptom of forces they are profoundly ignorant of; here, laregely technological. Once these have taken hold, activists have only to prod at the now meaningless tradition.

You don't consider the pill part of the Overton window? It was introduced largely due to an ulterior agenda of population control and eugenics, and seems to have furthered that goal effectively.

If you read more carefully, you will recognize that it's saying it's rare for elected politicians because of the short-term constraints of needing to win elections, and that change in the Window is driven by actors who aren't concerned with losing their job if they advocate outside of it.

> It's a description of why politicians will advocate for some policies; it's not a theory of change.

It's both.

> (Such a theory would be unevidenced and obviously false).

This seems to be based on your own (“unevidenced and obviously false”, IMO) naive rational choice theory of change. Yes, broad forces are responsible for what would be the long-term equilibrium if conditions were static. Conditions change fast enough that the conditions which set the long-term equilibrium don't determine the actual Overton Window, or even consistently the short-term direction of change, though they are part of the context which influences change.

“Similarly for advocacy, our model should perhaps be that seemingly extreme proposals serve to stretch the Overton window before the middle-ground wins out.”

This seems like an argument in favor of openly advocating positions that are good but too far from the current consensus to be adopted. Dragging the Overton window toward stupid policies or bad behavior is a different issue.

There does need to be a middle ground.

But there are definitely dangers when charities try to maximise revenue:

1. They are (to some extent) competing for donors. If it's zero sum, then more marketing spending means the least efficient charities "win".

2. It might even be negative sum, as donors turn away from charity in general.

3. A focus on revenue changes the way charities operate, and might change the type of people who work there.

I think there's a sweet spot to engagement. You don't have to send the donor out there, but sending them photos does help. They get the personal connection and the feeling that their money was well spent without needing to waste a lot of money. Obviously it's not 100% efficient, but it brings a lot to the table - a certain level of accountability, engagement, and not too much inefficiency.

Deliberately stretching the overtone window to extreme positions is how things go to hell - you might think you are just applying leverage but plenty of others will happily occupy the space you created and push things farther out still.

Overtone creep is how the French Revolution progressed from enlighten liberalism to the guillotine and indiscriminate mass executions.

The perfect is the enemy of the good. Many of these charities are technically irrational but realistically people are likely not to get involved at all otherwise. For example, many people donate food to collection bins for food banks, despite the food banks being able to buy food wholesale for a tiny fraction of the price. Being aware of this I smugly refrain from donating overpriced retail food but I haven't yet gotten round to actually sending them some cash yet instead and I suppose not many other have either.

What % of the calories that food banks buy are junk food?

> Talented and capable people who end up working low impact non profit jobs at low pay

I currently volunteer at a raptor conservation charity. For no pay at all. They cannot afford to pay anyone but their trained bird team and a small office staff. Volunteers like myself are a force multiplier for the trained permanent staff. By doing mundane jobs for them, we free them to apply their expertise where it matters. Pre-COVID, these mundane tasks included basic animal husbandry, grounds work and infrastructure maintenance. Good skill fits for these role include carpentry, building, 'roady' type knowledge (how to build and wire-up outdoor structures) and many others. Post-COVID, new tasks include cleaning, sanitization and crowd management (facilitating social distancing).

> If you had a real job and donated half your income to the cause, both you and the cause would be better off.

I used to provide financial support to them before I retired. Now I only work intermittently, and I'm using my income to fund my own time working for them, for free.

This is genuinely the best way I can help them. Especially now that their income has been decimated by COVID lockdowns.

[Edit] The flaw in the parent's line of reasoning is assuming that all a non-profit organisation needs is money. Sometimes they need actual stuff doing (such as building a new aviary) and volunteers let them reduce or even eliminate the not-insignificant labour and contracting costs.

I think what you're describing is "moral competence" as the article frames it. That is to say: your efforts are not directed to the end of "how can I be seen as working to support raptor conservation" but rather "how can I support raptor conservation?"

Or, in other words: how can you genuinely further the cause, rather than simply seem to?

> If you had a real job and donated half your income to the cause, both you and the cause would be better off.

This argument takes as an unstated axiom that the correct way to organize society is by having everyone in a role that strictly maximizes that system's assessment of their economic output. It then concludes that the correct way to effect change is to embrace that system and after the results are in, redirect those economic outputs to desired goals.

As the reader may have noticed in examining that unstated premise, this presents quite a dilemma when it becomes clear that this way of organizing society is in fact itself the main cause of the human misery you're trying to eliminate.

> This argument takes as an unstated axiom that the correct way to organize society is by having everyone in a role that strictly maximizes that system's assessment of their economic output.

No, that's not the axiom. The axiom is that scarce resources should be allocated to their most productive uses. If the scarce resource of your time and energy can be more productive at building houses if you have a real job and donate a portion of your income to house building, than if you built houses directly, then that's how that scarce resource should be allocated.

Note that it is you doing the resource allocation here, not "the system". It is true that "the system" is very inefficient, but what it's inefficient at is providing people with opportunities to choose from to be more productive with the scarce resource of their time and energy. The way to make that more efficient is more free markets and less government regulation; but our society tends to be the other way around.

> this way of organizing society is in fact itself the main cause of the human misery you're trying to eliminate.

looks like this went completely over your head

> looks like this went completely over your head

The fact that I disgree with the statement you quoted doesn't mean I didn't read it.

> most productive uses

The problem comes when you try to define this phrase in a way that’s not a tautology.

Our current economic system defines economic productivity to be the thing that generates the highest economic returns according to the rules of the system.

Without an independently derived set of values the phrase doesn’t have any descriptive value.

You could just as well be describing Bostrom’s paperclip maximizer, and I would suggest, in fact, that this is exactly what you’re doing.

> The problem comes when you try to define this phrase in a way that’s not a tautology.

Economists solved that one along time ago: revealed preference.

> Our current economic system defines economic productivity to be the thing that generates the highest economic returns according to the rules of the system.

That's because our current economic system is not a free market, so instead of reflecting the revealed preferences of people making choices in a free market, it reflects the revealed preferences of politicians and financial institutions.

There's no reason an economy has to work that way. Our does because it's driven by politics, not economics.

> Without an independently derived set of values

What people want is an independently derived set of values.

> Economists solved that one along time ago: revealed preference.

I'm quite certain they didn't solve the problem of determining the correct long term value system for the human race. For context I have looked into the idea, I have a degree in Economics.

We don't even have a perfect optimal strategy for the completely bounded game of chess yet. But somehow we've solved the problem of determining optimal strategy for the unbounded game of social and economic interactions between millions of independent actors? It's a pleasant thought, but no, we haven't.

In real life what people are doing is making economic tradeoffs within a narrowly constrained section of a complex adaptive system within which no actor can do much more than guess at the prospective outcomes of their decisions.

Or put another way, in economic terms how would an economic actor express a clear preference for a sequence of events that leads to a personal connection with someone who doesn't have any money, when they are not aware that's even a thing they can do?

> I'm quite certain they didn't solve the problem of determining the correct long term value system for the human race.

Having a non-tautological way of capturing what "more productive uses" means, which is what I was responding to, in no way requires solving this much more difficult (and quite possibly unsolvable in that there might not be a single answer) problem.

> in economic terms how would an economic actor express a clear preference for a sequence of events that leads to a personal connection with someone who doesn't have any money, when they are not aware that's even a thing they can do?

If they're not even aware of the option, then the obvious thing to do is to make them aware of the option. Economists call this "creating a market". Enabling transactions to take place that couldn't take place before is one of the primary ways that new wealth is created. If this isn't happening, it's a sign that "the system" is, once again, not a free market; and the way to fix it is to make it more of a free market.

> If this isn't happening, it's a sign that "the system" is, once again, not a free market; and the way to fix it is to make it more of a free market.

Indeed. In our back and forth we've now teased out the basic "no-true-scotsman" argument used to advocate for free markets, also known as the Efficient Markets Hypothesis.

Why the free market will solve the problem. What's that you say? The market is producing disastrous outcomes making life unlivable for huge swaths of humanity? Well clearly you should add more free market then, as the cause is clearly not having enough of that.

The reality is that not all social goods and goals can be priced, or measured, or even understood and articulated in a way we all agree on. And, the really core and subtle point that often gets missed is that it's literally impossible to base your normative system on the idea that we'll all just optimize for outcomes when that system is non-deterministic.

All models are false, some are useful. For sure the economic canon has some analytic and descriptive value, that's not in doubt. But it has very serious and severe limits, and that's where all the actually interesting public policy discussion happens.

> the basic "no-true-scotsman" argument used to advocate for free markets, also known as the Efficient Markets Hypothesis

No, that's not the basis for wanting more free markets. The basis for wanting more free markets is that, under conditions where a free market is not efficient (and yes, such conditions often exist), the failure modes of a free market are still better than the failure modes of the alternatives. In other words, free markets are not "best" so much as "least worst" (the worst except for all the others, as Churchill would have said).

In the particular case we were discussing, you were assuming that a transaction was possible (a personal connection) that both parties would value. That means, in a free market, both parties would agree to the transaction, so it would happen. The problem, as you stated it, was that a market did not even exist for such transactions--the parties weren't even aware of each other. And, as I pointed out, the obvious way to fix that is to allow someone to create such a market. Nobody needs to make any decisions about "how social goods are priced" to do that--the market participants themselves will take care of that, by deciding which transactions to engage in and which not. See further comments below.

> The market is producing disastrous outcomes making life unlivable for huge swaths of humanity?

No, it's not. What's producing those disastrous outcomes is the failure modes of the alternatives to a free market. See below.

> The reality is that not all social goods and goals can be priced, or measured, or even understood and articulated in a way we all agree on.

Yes. And in a free market, we don't have to agree on all those things. All we have to agree on is whether or not to engage in particular transactions. If you and I can have a transaction that both of us voluntarily agree on (and that's the definition of a free market, that all transactions are voluntary--nobody is ever forced to make a transaction they don't want to make), then it doesn't matter what the rest of our values or goals are; all that matters is that we agree to make the transaction.

And that is why the failure modes of free markets are better than the failure modes of the alternatives--because the alternatives force people to do things that they don't want to do, or that they even think are very bad ideas, just because someone else in a position of power says so. That is what makes "life unlivable for huge swaths of humanity"--people being forced to do what some idiot in power says, instead of what their own intelligence and common sense would suggest.

> it's literally impossible to base your normative system on the idea that we'll all just optimize for outcomes when that system is non-deterministic

You're assuming that there has to be a single "normative system" that everyone is forced to abide by. And that, as above, is precisely what a free market does not do, and why our current system, which does do that, causes so much misery. Your so-called "public policy discussion" is all about what normative system to impose on people. Your public policy "experts" never even consider the idea of not imposing things on people at all.

> Our current economic system defines economic productivity to be the thing that generates the highest economic returns according to the rules of the system.

If by "the rules of the system", you mean the idea that things are worth what people will voluntarily pay for them, then I agree with your definition. But that's not tautological. It is a distributed price-setting process that everyone contributes to through their own economic choices.

When it comes to charity, people contribute time and money based on their perceived impact. As a donor, I would value 100 new houses higher than 10 new houses, but that's just me. Other people are free to make different choices.

What is clean air worth? What do you pay for it? In the US, you pay taxes which are distributed under the purview of a democratic republic, whose officials may decide to create an EPA, which may enforce rules, etc. Tautologically, clean air is now worth something in the US, because the system pays for it. But it wasn't the case 100 years ago. Or in another timeline where Nixon didn't create the agency. It's worth something because the conditions of the system aligned its interest with that outcome, not because of some direct preference of the populace. In many countries, clean air isn't "worth much" because you can't pay for it, even though the people want it badly.

> It's worth something because the conditions of the system aligned its interest with that outcome, not because of some direct preference of the populace.

You make it sound as though "the system" is a sentient agent that acts independently of the preference of the populace. Democracy in the US is far from perfect, but don't you think that the creation of the EPA was at least somewhat related to the preference of the populace?

Sure, the system generally may loosely correlated with the long-term preference of the populace depending on the government, such that people don't revolt. But the system is designed to keep itself in power or maximize its own goals. It doesn't decide any more than water decides to take the path of least resistance downhill.

Did the populace decide they like bread and milk in the back corner of the grocery store, or does the capital-maximizing system decide its best if you walk through the aisles to get there? Are impulse purchases of gum at the checkout aisle because people really wanted gum when they walked into the store? On and on it goes.

Just so I am clear, you propose "complete reorganization of society" as the practical approach for saving the puppies?

The puppies are gonna die, CPLX.

This is such an underrated point. A lot of the lucrative “real” jobs are quite destructive and counter to the problems that many charities and NGOs try to solve. Also, if everyone thinks this way it’s going to be very hard for these charities and NGOs to find the skills they need at rates that they can manage to fund. A skilled worker can potentially generate a lot of value that might not directly flow back to the organization they work for but to other parts of society - that means the organization has no business case for hiring them (the economics don’t exactly work out) but in the bigger picture it can still be a net benefit.

It actually isn't. I'll talk from "virtual" experience. It's food production in a virtual economy. I have the option of overcharging people and expanding my business faster or charging less so that even the poor players can afford it and not having enough money to expand. If I go with the "charity" route it will take much longer for the underlying problem to be solved.

By doing economic charity (not to be confused with donation based charity that charges nothing to the people receiving help) you're also ruining the price signal for other people. They see that the market has been saturated with cheap products but a few weeks later there is a shortage again because the "charity dude" is not producing nearly enough.

This is also one of the reason price gouging laws don't make sense. People will scalp and sell for market rate. The one who is losing out is the original manufacturer of the product. They could have used that money to fund extra production or you know, just reward them for producing the valuable product in the first place. It would still mean less money to scammers.

If you think that the product should be provided at a lower price then involve the government and let it sell the product at subsidized prices. That way it can fulfill an obligation to the people but at the same time also eat it's own words. If the manufacturer is overcharging too much then cut out the middleman and produce yourself.

Transfer this to someone who isn't running a business but instead just tries to get a better job. That person still has the moral "obligation" (it's obviously optional) to do effective charity or at least not make things worse.

See "Effective Altruism" as a topic and the book "Doing Good Better" as a more in-depth exploration of what's being said here [1]. It's really interesting to see how psychology and outcomes are interrelated.

[1] https://www.effectivealtruism.org/doing-good-better/

> Talented and capable people who end up working low impact non profit jobs at low pay. If you had a real job

These are real jobs. As real as any other job. It is absurd to consider them not real. It is also not like people would be super lining up at those positions.

And third, the people week make that choice do it because this is what they want to do. They might or might not be successful or happy in corporation. If only stupid people worked in those positions, those non-profits would never be a good place to send money to.

I'm glad someone pointed this out, it irks me. Also, when you work at a for-profit job and donate money, a lot of that money goes to pay salaries. Wouldn't we want those nonprofit workers to be talented and capable?

If you keep thinking these dissident thoughts you may eventually come to the conclusion that huge portion of do-gooding is done for the benefit of the do-gooders, primarily the feel-good benefit. A few are trying hard to build a link between their own feel-good and the benefit of the supposed beneficiaries, but wishful thinking is rampant.

I often think of this SMBC comic [1]. If Superman wanted to maximise good, he could just turn a crank really fast.

However, maximizing utility is not the only goal. People want to feel good about their actions, and dumping money in a black hole just isn't that satisfying.

[1] https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-07-13

"dumping money in a black hole" is a very misleading word choice. The analogy with a black hole suggests that money disappears with no good.

Donating to cost-effective charities directly and significantly improves the quality of life for numerous individuals. Just because you don't "solve the whole problem" with your donations doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. Just like you don't choose to stop eating because eating a single meal won't satisfy your hunger for the next 30 years.

It's a deliberate choice of words. Yes, your money is going towards a good cause, but if you accidentally sent the money to the wrong place, you couldn't possibly tell. Your donation is never mapped to a specific result. It's just added to a much larger pool. You will never get a message saying "your donation paid Paul's first month of rent" or something to that effect.

By comparison, volunteering at a soup kitchen feels real, regardless of effectiveness. You see the people you help, and I suspect that's why people prefer being charitable in less efficient ways.

There are charities with extreme transparency. For example, all the money sent to the highly-rated (by GiveWell) charity the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) gets tied to specific distributions (specific villages). You get to see the photos of your money at work and updates about the quality of the malaria-protecting bednets years after they have been distributed.

[0] https://www.givewell.org/charities/amf

This isn't true. There are charities that do exactly what you claim they don't do. For example, https://www.againstmalaria.com/Default.aspx maps each donation to a specific bed net distribution, then gives you a status page (that you can share with others!), which tells you exactly what stage your distribution is at.

For example, I can see that one of my donations is currently in the manufacturing stage, one is on a boat travelling to the country, and one is being distributed to households right now.

After the distribution is complete, they'll post pictures from that distribution, as well as conduct follow up surveys in a few months, to ensure effective use. All this information is shared with the donor directly.

It sounds like charities have an accountability problem that could be solved with technology. If everything the charity did was public then people could rest assured that their money is well spent.

Evolution fucked us again. As a result, we feel drawn towards performing acts where we can be seen as doing good, not towards acts that do good. Being in a soup kitchen gives you witnesses, writing a check does not (especially with our shitty culture that often discourages people from talking about their philanthropic deeds).

If anyone has not seen this SMBC comic...really, you must.

This is very true. I just want to point out one under-appreciated side effect of hands-on altruisim: it does often change the person for the better.

It's often better to give money, and there's no better way to see how little you can do with your hands vs how much you can do with a dollar than to go and see it yourself. Even raising awareness about the problems with a visceral experience of being there can make a person more prone to donate money, advocate for causes, and be contemplative in their policy choices.

But, money is not a sure-fire solution. Even when donating money, this is a cognitive barrier that must be overcome. In major philanthropic work, a huge problem is matching the donor's expepectations of targetted "This person saved 1000 people" investments vs a "general fund" investment to, say, a global vaccine initiative. There's no traceability when you dump your dollars into a pool to buy a billion vaccines, but there is enormous positive impact. Contrast that with, say, building a well in a village (something that is usually poorly done, poorly maintained, and not very helpful compared with a municipal water project or sanitation education program). But the well has immediate impact that can be photographed and they probably got their name etched into it.

These aren't made up examples, I've heard these stories from policy / fund raisers. They just shake their head and agree that the world is slightly better, even if it could have been even more slightly better.

A colleague in my extended network had a pithy way of describing this: "Many distribution problems look like moral problems from far away." Not saying I agree with it completely, but it did change how I started looking at framings of societal problems.

I’m personally sympathetic to your concerns, but to play devil’s advocate: Who’s to say that typical high-paying “real jobs” are a net good for society, (even) assuming that their occupants donate half of their earnings to worthy causes?

I’d imagine that plenty of “talented and capable” people working in (what might be considered) “low impact non profit jobs at low pay” are aware of effective altruism, or similar movements that seem to reflect your perspective, but would consider working in high finance/Big Tech/management consulting/etc counterproductive to their ultimate goals.

Gentrification is often seen as bad but it's merely a matter how it's managed. Displacement is not a problem if you build the newcomers enough housing. They are willing to pay for expensive high rises and live there. Be happy that they don't actually want your house. But for the NIMBY that's the worst outcome. He doesn't want his neighbor to sell the plot because he wants to sell his own plot for profit. The lack of housing eventually results in displacement.

The opposite of gentrification is far worse. Stagnating communities feel the same effect. The local economy is transforming. Local culture is getting lost. Except all of it happens for no one's benefit.

People get the wrong impression and start "fighting" gentrification and then introduce real problems through misguided policy.

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