I think that telling people to empty their savings account is bad advice of similar kind as asking them to sell their kidney, both in regards to the consequences to people and in regards to the consequences to MIRI.
The people suffer for no good reason. MIRI gets a bad rep for destroying people’s lives. Everyone loses.
No. It doesn’t follow that you must either be naked or wear a mink coat. It doesn’t follow you must either be a complete hermit or a total party animal. It doesn’t follow that you need either have an empty savings account, or put everything in it.
Humans have decreasing marginal utility with money, so even if we model donors as perfectly rational (a bad assumption, of course), it still makes sense to donate some but not all of your money. Just because people sometimes have a bias towards finding a middle ground doesn’t mean that finding a middle ground is always wrong every time.
The xkcd you linked to is a good demonstration of one of the reasons that asking people to go into debt to fund MIRI is a horrible idea.
I think that telling people to empty their savings account is bad advice of similar kind as asking them to sell their kidney, both in regards to the consequences to people and in regards to the consequences to MIRI.
The people suffer for no good reason.
MIRI gets a bad rep for destroying people’s lives.
Everyone loses.
Then shouldn’t everyone who donates monthly stop that and feed the money into a savings account on general principles instead?
No. It doesn’t follow that you must either be naked or wear a mink coat. It doesn’t follow you must either be a complete hermit or a total party animal. It doesn’t follow that you need either have an empty savings account, or put everything in it.
This whole crazy thread just reminds me Why Our Kind Can’t Cooperate
I beg to differ.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GoldenMeanFallacy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation
which applies here because of the argument presented here, and here.
Humans have decreasing marginal utility with money, so even if we model donors as perfectly rational (a bad assumption, of course), it still makes sense to donate some but not all of your money. Just because people sometimes have a bias towards finding a middle ground doesn’t mean that finding a middle ground is always wrong every time.
The xkcd you linked to is a good demonstration of one of the reasons that asking people to go into debt to fund MIRI is a horrible idea.