you should give all your donation to the charity that most aids the global diversification program. Splitting your donations implies being risk-averse in what you personally achieve, which is perverse.
Well, you have to have a very bizarre utility function, for sure. ;)
even if you were risk-averse in lives saved, which I do not think you should be
I’m not sure about this point. I can imagine having a preference for saving at least X lives, versus an outcome with equal mean, but a more broadly distributed probability function.
I can imagine having a preference for saving at least X lives
I feel like you’ve got a point here but I’m not quite getting it. Our preferences are defined over outcomes, and I struggle to see how “saving X lives” can be seen as an outcome—I see outcomes more along the lines of “X number of people are born and then die at age 5, Y number of people are born and then die at age 70″. You can’t necessarily point to any individual and say whether or not they were “saved”.
I generally think of “the utility of saving 6 lives” as a shorthand for something like “the difference in utility between (X people die at age 5, Y people die at age 70) and (X-6 people die at age 5, Y+6 people die at age 70)”.
We’d have to use more precise language if that utility varies a lot for different choices of X and Y, of course.
Well, you have to have a very bizarre utility function, for sure. ;)
I’m not sure about this point. I can imagine having a preference for saving at least X lives, versus an outcome with equal mean, but a more broadly distributed probability function.
I feel like you’ve got a point here but I’m not quite getting it. Our preferences are defined over outcomes, and I struggle to see how “saving X lives” can be seen as an outcome—I see outcomes more along the lines of “X number of people are born and then die at age 5, Y number of people are born and then die at age 70″. You can’t necessarily point to any individual and say whether or not they were “saved”.
I generally think of “the utility of saving 6 lives” as a shorthand for something like “the difference in utility between (X people die at age 5, Y people die at age 70) and (X-6 people die at age 5, Y+6 people die at age 70)”.
We’d have to use more precise language if that utility varies a lot for different choices of X and Y, of course.