Ozy vs. Scott on Charity Baskets

A dialogue: Ozy argues an EA society would still diversify charity (like diversifying stocks) for uncertainty and to fund high-risk/high-return causes (research, new charities) alongside low-risk (bed nets). Scott rebuts by separating two things Ozy conflates — disaster aversion (why you diversify stocks: diminishing marginal utility of money + avoiding ruin) and low-hanging fruit (charities get less effective as they're funded). Disaster aversion doesn't apply to charity because the 100,000th life saved matters as much as the first, so you should take the +EV gamble; low-hanging fruit DOES shift which charity is best as money flows, but since you can look up charity budgets, at any moment there's one best charity and (unless you're Bill Gates) you should give it your whole donation.

Quality 72 · Strong. Strong, upper. A sharp, clarifying, oft-referenced EA argument: the disaster-aversion-vs-low-hanging-fruit distinction and the 'marginal utility of money ≠ marginal utility of lives → give all to the single best charity now' point are clean and correct. Held below Excellent as a relatively narrow (one-question) methodological dialogue rather than a major synthesis.

Claude’s paradigm shift 54 · Moderate. Moderate–Notable (54). Applying the disaster-aversion/low-hanging-fruit distinction to the charity-diversification question was a fresh, clarifying contribution to 2014 EA discourse, building on existing marginal-utility reasoning.

Real-world impact 3 · Moderate. Moderate (3). A load-bearing piece of EA donation-strategy reasoning (the 'give everything to the single most effective charity' case) with genuine bearing on how EAs actually allocate money; influential within the EA subculture, no broader material change.