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Comment by nmca | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

“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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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