This comment on a drawback of donating primarily to the charities you think is best lest you make it profitable to invest in being or appearing better by your standards, and various empirical parameters (availablility of honest signals, your ability to distinguish different signals, the quantity of funds allocated by decision rules like yours, the costs of dishonest signals) fall in a narrow region. I am skeptical that this is a real issue in practice (e.g. GiveWell channels to a top charity, rather than diversifying), separate from the problem of assessing evidence (which is normally focused on finding signals that are costly to fake in any case), but it’s still an interesting theoretical point which I hadn’t seen made on Less Wrong before.
It’s my impression that yes, more hand extension would have been good, but I didn’t follow his threads that closely.
I wonder if the trivial inconvenience of him not being that great of a communicator might have put people off from following his threads.
Does somebody want to post one part of Dmytry that seems new and true? My impression on a quick skim was not favorable.
This comment on a drawback of donating primarily to the charities you think is best lest you make it profitable to invest in being or appearing better by your standards, and various empirical parameters (availablility of honest signals, your ability to distinguish different signals, the quantity of funds allocated by decision rules like yours, the costs of dishonest signals) fall in a narrow region. I am skeptical that this is a real issue in practice (e.g. GiveWell channels to a top charity, rather than diversifying), separate from the problem of assessing evidence (which is normally focused on finding signals that are costly to fake in any case), but it’s still an interesting theoretical point which I hadn’t seen made on Less Wrong before.