There’s also some coordination thing that’s muddled in here. Like, “everyone protect their neighbor” is more efficient than “everyone seek out the maximal marginal use of their dollar to save a life”. This doesn’t necessarily cash out—indeed, why *not* seek out the maximal marginal life-saving?
For one thing, the seeking is a cost; it can also be a long-term benefit if it “adds up”, accumulating evidence and understanding, but that’s a more specific kind of seeking (and you might even harm this project if e.g. you think you should lie to direct donations).
For another thing, you’re seriously eliding the possibility of, for example, helping to create the conditions under which malaria-ridden areas could produce their own mosquito nets, by (1) not trusting that people could take care of themselves, (2) having high time-preference for saving lives.
For a third thing, it’s treating, I think maybe inappropriately, everyone as being in a marketplace, and eliding that we (humans, minds) are in some sense (though not close to entirely) “the same agent”. So if I pay you low wages to really inefficiently save a life, maybe that was a good marginal use of my dollar, but concretely what happened is that you did a bunch of labor for little value. We might hope that eventually this process equilibriates to people paying for what they want and therefore getting it, but still, we can at least notice that it’s very far from how we would act if we were one agent with many actuators.
There’s also some coordination thing that’s muddled in here. Like, “everyone protect their neighbor” is more efficient than “everyone seek out the maximal marginal use of their dollar to save a life”. This doesn’t necessarily cash out—indeed, why *not* seek out the maximal marginal life-saving?
For one thing, the seeking is a cost; it can also be a long-term benefit if it “adds up”, accumulating evidence and understanding, but that’s a more specific kind of seeking (and you might even harm this project if e.g. you think you should lie to direct donations).
For another thing, you’re seriously eliding the possibility of, for example, helping to create the conditions under which malaria-ridden areas could produce their own mosquito nets, by (1) not trusting that people could take care of themselves, (2) having high time-preference for saving lives.
For a third thing, it’s treating, I think maybe inappropriately, everyone as being in a marketplace, and eliding that we (humans, minds) are in some sense (though not close to entirely) “the same agent”. So if I pay you low wages to really inefficiently save a life, maybe that was a good marginal use of my dollar, but concretely what happened is that you did a bunch of labor for little value. We might hope that eventually this process equilibriates to people paying for what they want and therefore getting it, but still, we can at least notice that it’s very far from how we would act if we were one agent with many actuators.