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Comment by mlyle | Hacker News Reader

It's not like this must be exclusively A or B.

The high school kid who volunteers at a homeless shelter and hopes it will help their college app is likely doing it both out of altruism and self-interest.

(Actually, the person who helps people because it feels good is also acting out of self-interest).

Given many ways to be altruistic, people will usually pick the ones that coincide more with their self interest. And in turn, self interest can warp a lot of the outcomes, even if people are trying to help.

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What if you want the world to be demonstrably better, and yet you're pretty sure the world is not just you?

Does that count, or is it axiomatic that for every person, the world is entirely just them and they have no concept of everything/anything outside themselves? I feel like this is probably only some people, and doesn't describe literally every person.

I don't think you read what I said.

I retired from industry to teach high school.

A really big part of why I did this is because I wanted to help. I make basically nothing. There are many more personally lucrative things that I could do that help society and people less.

But there's millions of ways that I could help. I didn't maximize my impact, I don't think. I did one that was a confluence between altruism, feeling good to me, conferring other advantages, etc. In other words, altruism was not the sole factor in my decision -- just a very large one.

Is altruism entirely about self interest?

I'm not saying that to take away from it, but people do things to feel good, or because they get something out of it. Either way you are being rewarded.

This explains plenty of bizarre outcomes. I was speaking to a guy who worked at a food bank. They would take cash donations, buy food at full price at the supermarket, then have volunteers (in a paid for space) pack up boxes.

A more sensible route would be food vouchers. People can buy what they want, no money spent on rent, so more goes to those in need.

But donators want to feel they are donating food and volunteers, probably mainly the higher ups feel that all this unneeded machinery is 'productive' therefore more meaningful / they are in charge of actual people and a physical location which makes them feel important. Thus the inefficiency continues.

The majority of food banks get discounted supplies. They seldom pay full retail price. In some cases I know about, distributors and retailers will sell older perishable stock to food banks when they don't think they can move it quickly enough.

The trouble with food vouchers is that junkies trade them for drugs. Vouchers are more "liquid" than physical food.

No. They were paying full price, I specifically checked.

I mean the junkies could just use the money they didn't spend buying food to buy drugs. I'm not entirely sure this isn't just an extension of people feeling like they're doing a good thing rather than actually doing a good thing. And that's assuming a meaningful proportion of food bank users are actually junkies.

I'm not saying that food banks never pay full price for food-- I'm sure it happens some. But for the most part food banks pay way below market rate.

But, for example, if you make a >$100 donation to Second Harvest Food Bank (i.e. so that transactional costs are small), each 50 cents becomes a distributed meal. Note that they collect a few additional cents from the partner charity that is distributing the meal.

OTOH, the school I work at does a Thanksgiving meal drive where students buy food at retail and bring it in. It is definitely less efficient than giving funds somewhere like SHFB, but I think it's an important tangible experience especially for younger kids to give something they recognize as food to the less fortunate.

Well this food bank does. So it would be silly to claim otherwise :-p.

I'm not saying all food banks should just do vouchers. I'm saying that if you're at the point of paying retail prices, you may as well give someone a voucher rather than spending time, effort and money on a tin of beans that a person doesn't even like.

The point of my example is that they could pretty easily do better for those that they're trying to help, but that would involve doing less themselves. Which demonstrates that it isn't all about helping others, it's about demonstrating that your helping others.

> I mean the junkies could just use the money they didn't spend buying food to buy drugs.

With vouchers they can do that AND also spend the money they would need for food on drugs / gambling / whatever.

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