Comment by wyager
9 years ago
Humans are bad at multiplying utilities. Building a service that gives $100 of utility to ten million people is probably better for society than improving the nutrition of a few hundred children in SF. People tend to over-value charitable endeavors that fall into certain categories, like helping the homeless or feeding the children. I suspect it's a societal mechanism for encouraging practical charity that was a lot more effective before our current age of plenty.
Humans also have a bad habit of double counting contributions. Facebook is "connecting the world" but how many of those connections would've happened over the phone or in person without them? I'm not saying Facebook is net negative, just that a lot of those $100 contributions you are adding up are just shifted from another business that went under.
Humans are also bad at prioritizing and good at rationalizing, and conveniently forgetting huge problems that happen just out of sight.
I can't imagine a single person whose life would be better in any significant way with an extra $100. Not even a homeless person would find this quantity helpful over the long-term.
> I can't imagine a single person whose life would be better in any significant way with an extra $100.
The fact that you chose to make this argument demonstrates you are using your evolved utility-heuristic hardware and not any sort of rational approach.
What you are probably doing is doing is clamping the utility of $100 to zero ("not significant" is the key concept). Then your brain, which is already bad at multiplying utilities, multiplied roughly zero by ten million people, got roughly zero, and then you made this comment.
Actually, it might not have even done that last part. It sounds like you jumped from "$100 is basically nothing" to "might as well not even consider the number of people gaining utility". It's a good effort-saving heuristic.
So that's the first problem with your argument; it's wrong from a utility theoretic perspective. It doesn't matter if the per-person amount is small. You have to multiply it by the number of people being affected (and your utility function's multiplier on their utility function).
The second problem with your argument is that you're making sort of a fallacy of composition. It's true that $100 isn't much in the grand scheme of things for an individual. But all the utility you ever experience in your entire life is just the sum of lots of (arbitrarily) small utilities. You gain almost nothing from any single bite of food, but it would be wrong to use this fact to claim that you don't gain anything from eating. Even if Google or Apple or Costco or Toyota have individually only contributed a few tens of thousands of dollars of utility to my life, their collective contribution represents the total utility I get from modern industrialization, which is very large. Similarly, if 0.01% of a population 10,000,000 can provide an "insignificant" $100 of utility to each person in that population, that's $100,000 of utility per person. For modern software, where marginal costs are negligible, we get incredible economies of scale.
Facebook and Google reach billions of people, providing at least tens of dollars of utility per year (probably more like hundreds), which translates to trillions of dollars of utility over decades. That's probably more utility than has ever been gained from charity.
At bulk scales, like we have in today's society, the kind of analysis your brain does by default doesn't work. It gives the wrong answer, which is why people think it's better to help a small charity case than do something that's mildly beneficial for a huge number of people.
Re: "It doesn't matter if the per-person amount is small. You have to multiply it by the number of people being affected (and your utility function's multiplier on their utility function)."
You are stating the opposite viewpoint without any support. And I don't agree with it.
Re: "It gives the wrong answer, which is why people think it's better to help a small charity case than do something that's mildly beneficial for a huge number of people."
I don't know why people are saying I think people should go to work for charities. This is totally a straw man argument, as my opinion is that charities often are a waste of talent.
Re: "It's true that $100 isn't much in the grand scheme of things for an individual. But all the utility you ever experience in your entire life is just the sum of lots of (arbitrarily) small utilities."
I agree. But the vast majority of people, especially in Silicon Valley, think this way. At least a few people should be tackling big problems. For example, as I mentioned elsewhere, we are deploying insecure IoT at scale, which is effectively building a weapon for our enemies to use against us. I'm hoping that someone is going to do something about this. Note that working on this problem is not entirely altruistic -- it is likely to be a very profitable endeavor.
There's a lot to address here. To be honest -- and I'm going to put this as politely as I can -- this discussion is not very interesting to me and I am going to bow out.
But in general, I will suggest that you stick to the facts. Calling someone, e.g. me, "irrational" is irrational. To turn it back to you, I think what you've done is you've learned about a theory in school (that I don't agree with) and you're merely checking to see if I'm in compliance with it. You should do your own thinking.