If we do adopt a child, we will likely spend that hundreds of thousands of dollars on the child and not on the charities.
What are you aiming to optimize for? If it’s truly altruism, then it’s unlikely a kid would generate the same utility as hundreds of thousands of dollars going toward great charities.
Realistically, the current answer to this is “My wife’s utility function.” That includes a fair amount of altruism, although not necessarily in an organized way.
After review, I think most of my approaches to altruism also seem to be disorganized. The only thread that seems to run through them is that they seem to be focused on having minimum guilt, but that means I need to have a better grasp of ‘What makes me feel guilty?’ to answer the question well or I’m just pulling a phlogiston.
My current model of my own guilt sort of feels like something which slowly increases over time which can be removed by being altruistic in a similar manner to how people get hungry over time and they minimize that by eating.
That being said, that doesn’t quite seem like it cleaves reality correctly, but I can’t think of a better metaphor right now. I’m going to want to think more about this.
What are you aiming to optimize for? If it’s truly altruism, then it’s unlikely a kid would generate the same utility as hundreds of thousands of dollars going toward great charities.
Realistically, the current answer to this is “My wife’s utility function.” That includes a fair amount of altruism, although not necessarily in an organized way.
After review, I think most of my approaches to altruism also seem to be disorganized. The only thread that seems to run through them is that they seem to be focused on having minimum guilt, but that means I need to have a better grasp of ‘What makes me feel guilty?’ to answer the question well or I’m just pulling a phlogiston.
My current model of my own guilt sort of feels like something which slowly increases over time which can be removed by being altruistic in a similar manner to how people get hungry over time and they minimize that by eating.
That being said, that doesn’t quite seem like it cleaves reality correctly, but I can’t think of a better metaphor right now. I’m going to want to think more about this.