In the discussion Curiosity – Controversial Activism Is Problematic, @Lebowski said:
I don’t know how Elliot would address this but I think I have a thought worth considering.
Consider some project where there’s absolutely no opposition by anybody that affects the effectiveness of your efforts. For example, consider the project of spending $100 on donating some philosophy books to kids who requested the book (this is, or has at least been, a real thing). Nobody’s fighting you on that directly, so you can just spend whatever without obstruction and maximize the value you get. Your dollars are fully 100% effective at buying you the books at the market price to give to people.
Now suppose you are considering donating to a controversial political cause, like say something related to guns or abortion. The efforts of the other side of that debate will reduce the effectiveness of your dollars. Not only that, but various factors completely outside of your control (like events that are interpreted as reasons to pass new legislation, general political dynamics and cultural trends in the country, the ideologies taught to people at school) will have a massive impact on the effectiveness of your donation as well. Your $100 is a bit like a single vote or maybe a few votes in a Presidential election in terms of its importance.
Suppose you are considering donating to the book cause but then donate to the political cause instead. What is the effect on the book purchases? Books are pretty cheap, and nobody’s fighting you on this, so your money probably makes some difference here. Some book purchases probably just won’t happen.
Suppose you are considering the political donation but then switch to the book purchases. What is the effect on your favored political cause? Probably nothing. If $100 was enough to notice at all, it’d have to be a pretty small group that probably wouldn’t have much influence anyways in a controversial political fight. If there is a general downward trend in fundraising, well-organized groups have ways of dealing with that and stepping up their fundraising anyways.
So I guess my point is that you have to consider the marginal impact of your $100 in the different causes. The marginal impact is going to be highly variable depending on stuff like whether it’s a controversial political debate with two generally pretty well-funded sides and other factors.
Suppose you don’t donate $100 to the controversial political group, and the other side in the debate wins a big political fight and passes some bad laws. Should that whole harm be ascribed to your failure to donate? No. That’d be kind of like you blaming every bad thing from some Presidential administration for your failure to vote against him in his elections. But where you said…
So suppose I choose A because it’s uncontroversial and my efforts there won’t get cancelled out. Life gets 100 units better because of my work on A. But because I left B unaddressed, life gets 100 units worse because of anti-B’s work. A and B cancel each other out. I’m still left in the situation where total life benefit units don’t change.
…you seemed to be doing something like that. I think you were assuming that you could just move resources around from non-controversial to controversial efforts and have them be the same level of effectiveness. But I don’t think that actually makes sense, for the reasons I’ve explained above.
Given the same resources or efforts, the marginal effectiveness of expending them in a controversial fight is going to be reduced compared to spending them on something else non-controversial. It’s sort of like a reverse multiplier effect of effectiveness (reverse if you think of it as going from non-controversial to controversial; it could be just a regular multiplier effect if you go from controversial to non-controversial).
By the way, I think the same point applies if you’re considering donating to a controversial political cause versus investing in yourself (in terms of professional education or personal development or whatever). Investing in yourself tends to not have an active opposition (kinda funny to imagine that existing), so you don’t get this reverse multiplier effect thing if you do it.
Note that the analysis is very different if you’re actually in a unique position to influence the outcome of, say, some controversial political fights. If you’re a sitting President, Senator, or Governor, then while it’d still be ideal to reach broad agreement where you can, controversial fights are inevitable and you matter to them. In a sense, you have unique or super high value specialized political resources: formal political authority, the ability to get news attention, and so on. That’s not the situation of the overwhelming majority of people though.