This post demonstrates a common failure of LessWrong thinking, where it is assumed that there is one right answer to something, when in fact this might not be the case. There may be many “right ways” for a single person to think about how much to give to charity. There may be different “right ways” for different people, especially if those people have different utility functions.
I think you probably know this, I am just picking on the wording, because I think that this wording nudges us towards thinking about these kinds of questions in an unhelpful way.
But it asks about “the right way to think about how much to give to charity”, not “the right amount to give to charity”. It is well possible (depending on what one means by “way to think about”) that there is one right way to think about how much to give to charity but it returns different outputs given different inputs.
This post demonstrates a common failure of LessWrong thinking, where it is assumed that there is one right answer to something, when in fact this might not be the case. There may be many “right ways” for a single person to think about how much to give to charity. There may be different “right ways” for different people, especially if those people have different utility functions.
I think you probably know this, I am just picking on the wording, because I think that this wording nudges us towards thinking about these kinds of questions in an unhelpful way.
But it asks about “the right way to think about how much to give to charity”, not “the right amount to give to charity”. It is well possible (depending on what one means by “way to think about”) that there is one right way to think about how much to give to charity but it returns different outputs given different inputs.