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> accepting the social and individual utility of enjoying the arts, but denying any such utility for enjoying the saved lives

But in the part of the article you quoted above, the author (me) specifically acknowledges the utility of enjoying saved lives. But this is a critique of the quadratic funding mechanism, which is a public goods funding mechanism meant to maximize the utility each individual independently derives from enjoying public good.

The whole point of the article is to critique this assumption -- to point out that people's motives are sometimes altruistic (they derive utility just from knowing other people benefit), but the optimality of QF assumes this vicarious utility does not exist. As the article states "When individuals make contributions for purely altruistic reasons, they don’t directly experience the utility themselves. And yet the optimality of QF assumes that all utility is direct utility, benefiting the contributor only."

Do you have any evidence that these supposed assumptions exist?

No one donates $100K to the opera because they enjoy attending opera $1M worth. It's absurd to accuse any opera organization of assuming that.

Someone buys a ticket to the opera for $100 because they enjoy attending opera >$100 worth. They donate $100K because they want other people to enjoy opera, or for personal advertising purposes, not charitable social purposes.

> Do you have any evidence that these supposed assumptions exist?

By existing, so you mean “hold in reality?”

The point of the article is that the assumption that underly QF do not hold in reality.

I believe they were asking for evidence that (significant numbers of) people hold those assumptions.

I don't think the author was claiming that significant number of people hold those assumptions. I thought the assumption was that the most people implementing QF believe that QF is optimal for their use case. However, the author's observed use cases tend to not match the preconditions for QF's optimality.

Exactly.

Thank you for replying to my critique! The whole point of me reading your text was not to critique your assumptions, but to understand your arguments. It would be great if you'd do the same: make understanding the whole point of your thought, not criticizing.

I'm willing to accept this statement of your's about QF as correct: "QF assumes that all utility is direct utility, benefiting the contributor only." This still does not exclude the utility of saving lives for the savior. If the act of saving a live is worth 10m units of currency to me, the utility that I derive must be at least 10m units of currency. This is the "direct utility benefiting the contributor"! You cannot claim that QF cares only about direct utility of the contributor, but then go on and set that direct utility to 0, claiming QF didn't care about it.

What an uncharitable reply. Not op, but you seem to miss the basic point of the article, I.e. you fail at your own criterion of making understanding your goal.

As someone not in this space I found the argument succinct and easy to follow. QF is optimal if you only have direct utility. To illustrate that this assumption is problematic, confront it with a hypothetical where direct utility is zero. Then you can clearly and immediately see that in this hypothetical it's not optimal.

Maybe the argument is hard to parse if you're not used to reading theoretical literature?

But OP did not follow his own terms: he refuses to take the direct utility of giving your money to charity into account and instead calculates some arbitrary utility of the saved lives, which is indirect utility.

If you value saving lives at a rate of $100,000 worth of utility and a cost of $100,000, then quadratic funding makes you [0] pay $150,000 of money for $100,000 worth of utility.

Make sure to carefully read articles before dismissing them twice. Thank you.

[0] you = your contribution + a magical subsidy (presumably paid by you indirectly)

The problem with the article is that they did not make the point you are conveying here.

They say: 1. QF cares only about direct utility 2. $saving a life brings $100,000 of INdirect utility for society and/or the person who's life is saved 3. we (again: who?!) don't care about the direct utility in this case

I have no idea how you can wrap your head around the idea that this is a good representation of any valid critique.

Btw, I think QF is stupid, but that's not the point here.

I'm confused, aren't those flaws the article is pointing out, not claims the article is making?

the article claims that a contributor to art benefits from enjoying the art and a contributor to cancer research doesn't (except for feeling good), and therefore quadratic funding would favor art contributions and disfavor cancer research contributions. GP claims (and i agree) that contributors to cancer research do benefit beyond feeling good. eg because they, or someone they care about might have or get cancer later and benefit from the research.

the challenge is that measuring benefit is hard.

I read it as claims the article was making. I too was confused, but perhaps that is just the communication?

I think the article was going for a comparison between extrinsic motivation (which they seem to claim the original quadratic funding requires) and intrinsic motivation. It seems they just chose a poor example. The article attempts to quantize the expected reward for the extrinsic motivation ("They each expect to experience €6,000,000 worth of individual utility") while it fails to quantize the expected reward for the intrinsic motivation ("But in the selfish scenario, total utility is 3 times higher, because the utility is experienced independently by each contributor, whereas utility of saved lives is experienced only once by each of the cancer patients).

I believe, it has to do with their narrow conception of "experience". I don't know how any rational person could expect to "experience" €6,000,000 worth of art as my first criticism. Now, it would be fair to say that the implication that the wealthy benefactors expect that experience could be seen as a criticism of quadratic funding. But to roll with that ludicrous expectation for the sake of argument and then to fail to give a similar expectation of reward from the experience of saving 60 lives is not a fair argument.

If I can "imagine" the benefactor expecting €6,000,000 worth of experience for knowing the art is on display at the local museum, I could "imagine" the benefactor expecting some non-zero-euro amount of experience for knowing 60 people survived cancer.

If we quantify the "experience" in euros for the first scenario, it seems unfair not to quantify the "experience" for the second scenario. In this case it is about being consistent in argument, which the article fails to do.

The article sets up (1) a straw man (2) with impossible to measure numbers. The author acknowledges the second fundamental flaw in the whole enterprise, but not the first.

What straw man? The assumptions underlying the theory of QF are spelled out cleanly in the original QF paper. The article is just enumerating these assumptions and showing they don't hold in reality.

The numbers in the example are indeed impossible to measure. But QF is claiming *optimality* -- that it maximizes social welfare -- when certain assumptions hold. To show that QF does not maximize social welfare when these assumptions don't hold, it suffices to show a single hypothetical counterexample.

I don't hold any cards in the game - if QF is bollocks, so be it, I couldn't care less.

The reasons why I've commented are:

1) the article does a really bad job at using words that matter to me, like "utility". If any theory – QF or OPs own line of thought – tells me that funding cancer research doesn't have utility for the person funding it, that theory is BS. I don't need a badly made up hypothetical counterexample for this.

2) The author contradicts themselves: "QF assumes that all utility is direct utility, benefiting the contributor only." – but then they go on and calculate the utility of spending money on saving lives not based on the utility of the contributors, because "that’s not the kind of utility we’re trying to maximize" (btw, who is "we"!?), but based on some arbitrary made-up value and number of saved lives.

Actually, everything you complain about is highly irrelevant. It can't be overstated how irrelevant your objection is.

> (other than feeling good about those lives being saved, but that’s not the kind of utility we’re trying to maximize).

Your interpretation of this statement is that the contributors have a fixed marginal utility for every single dollar, so that they will consider the situation where they spend $1,000,000 per live saved to be superior to the situation where they spend $100,000. In other words, you're saying that welfare is a veblen good for the donor.

The author makes the argument that the mere act of spending more money to save lives is not the type of utility we should strive for to maximize social welfare.

Your utility in question is not about feeling good about saving people regardless of cost, it's about feeling good about saving people, precisely because it costs money and you personally spent money to do it.

By the way, why is that "your utility"? Why am I putting words in your mouth? Because you're disagreeing with the author and therefore necessarily put yourself at odds with the authors objection to the first interpretation. Hence you must necessarily agree with it, otherwise you're just trolling and that would be uncharitable of me to accuse you of. So, yes, you must have mistakenly chosen the silly interpretation.

I made you spend a quadratic amount of time on your reply than I did, so maybe you have mistakenly chosen the silly path of QF yourself.

I think I disagree with nkmnz' specifics. But I'm not sure! It's possible I might agree with nkmnz across the board.

This might be a case where someone familiar with the subject could follow what you're saying just fine, but most of us HN commenters don't know enough about the subject to get it. That can happen here (e.g. on physics topics). In any case I can't really follow your arguments closely.

I don't think you're distinguishing consistently or clearly between the OP and the theory being examined in the OP.

Maybe. It would help if the author were consistently distinguishing between his own assumptions and those he's examining, e.g.:

> that’s not the kind of utility we’re trying to maximize

Who is "we"? I read it as "the author applying the assumptions of QF", yet the whole point he makes there in the name of QF would contradict the previous statement of his that "QF assumes that all utility is direct utility".

If you haven't heard of the topic of the article before, why do you impugn the article then? From your comment it seems like you can't distinguish what the QF proposal is assuming (and the author is criticizing as unrealistic) from claims of the author.

The author makes no statement about the utility of enjoying the arts vs the utility of saving lives. They're making up hypothetical examples with specific properties that demonstrate problems with QF.

Sorry to say, but your observation is wrong. They do make explicit statements about the utility of enjoying the arts:

> They each expect to experience €6,000,000 worth of individual utility from enjoying the additional €9,000,000 of art.

> Net social welfare:

> Total Utility = 3 × €6,000,000 = €18,000,000

...just to go ahead and to deny any relevancy of the utility of saved lives:

> the three contributors don’t experience that utility (other than feeling good about those lives being saved, but that’s not the kind of utility we’re trying to maximize).