Note that helping people become personally more effective is a much easier meme to spread than helping people better understand how to contribute to public goods (ie how to better understand efficient charity and existential risk).
It seems much easier to change the amount of effort someone expends on near-optimally-useful public goods from 1% to 2% than to double someone’s productivity.
No question it is much easier, but in almost all cases it would be massively more useful for yourself and for the world in general to double your productivity than to double your effort towards or effect on public goods.
I strongly disagree. Whether it’s existential risks or cryonics or Africa or whatever else it is you think near-optimally-useful charity would be focused on, the effect of a dollar going there outweighs the effect of making a random LessWronger a dollar richer by orders of magnitude. Given that we’re talking about helping other people be more productive, this isn’t an egoism vs altruism thing; it’s a stupid altruism vs smart altruism thing.
Our intuitions disagree. People, in my experience, are much more highly motivated to affect their own lives than to become slightly better at affecting the lives of distant (in space or time) un-seen others. The latter is abstract and personally irrelevant, the former is concrete and personally beneficial.
How many people spend thousands on personal growth workshops vs. spending money to research the best charities? I think there are many orders of magnitude there. On the other hand, getting the best charity right may make your charity 100x more efficient, while a personal growth workshop may only make you a few percent more efficient. But personal productivity is multiplied by everything you do, while only a small portion of your budget goes to charity. Multiply these out, and I think you’ll see that the effect on improving individuals is much higher than on improving their charitable giving.
My charitable donations aren’t the only benefit others derive from my work.
Also, I have no idea how persuadable most people are in the amount of their total giving. Maybe it’s very hard to get anyone to double their contributions.
It seems much easier to change the amount of effort someone expends on near-optimally-useful public goods from 1% to 2% than to double someone’s productivity.
No question it is much easier, but in almost all cases it would be massively more useful for yourself and for the world in general to double your productivity than to double your effort towards or effect on public goods.
I strongly disagree. Whether it’s existential risks or cryonics or Africa or whatever else it is you think near-optimally-useful charity would be focused on, the effect of a dollar going there outweighs the effect of making a random LessWronger a dollar richer by orders of magnitude. Given that we’re talking about helping other people be more productive, this isn’t an egoism vs altruism thing; it’s a stupid altruism vs smart altruism thing.
Our intuitions disagree. People, in my experience, are much more highly motivated to affect their own lives than to become slightly better at affecting the lives of distant (in space or time) un-seen others. The latter is abstract and personally irrelevant, the former is concrete and personally beneficial.
How many people spend thousands on personal growth workshops vs. spending money to research the best charities? I think there are many orders of magnitude there. On the other hand, getting the best charity right may make your charity 100x more efficient, while a personal growth workshop may only make you a few percent more efficient. But personal productivity is multiplied by everything you do, while only a small portion of your budget goes to charity. Multiply these out, and I think you’ll see that the effect on improving individuals is much higher than on improving their charitable giving.
My charitable donations aren’t the only benefit others derive from my work.
Also, I have no idea how persuadable most people are in the amount of their total giving. Maybe it’s very hard to get anyone to double their contributions.