[jwarden]

> accepting the social and individual utility of enjoying the arts, but denying any such utility for enjoying the saved lives

But in the part of the article you quoted above, the author (me) specifically acknowledges the utility of enjoying saved lives. But this is a critique of the quadratic funding mechanism, which is a public goods funding mechanism meant to maximize the utility each individual independently derives from enjoying public good.

The whole point of the article is to critique this assumption -- to point out that people's motives are sometimes altruistic (they derive utility just from knowing other people benefit), but the optimality of QF assumes this vicarious utility does not exist. As the article states "When individuals make contributions for purely altruistic reasons, they don’t directly experience the utility themselves. And yet the optimality of QF assumes that all utility is direct utility, benefiting the contributor only."

[nkmnz]

Thank you for replying to my critique! The whole point of me reading your text was not to critique your assumptions, but to understand your arguments. It would be great if you'd do the same: make understanding the whole point of your thought, not criticizing.

I'm willing to accept this statement of your's about QF as correct: "QF assumes that all utility is direct utility, benefiting the contributor only." This still does not exclude the utility of saving lives for the savior. If the act of saving a live is worth 10m units of currency to me, the utility that I derive must be at least 10m units of currency. This is the "direct utility benefiting the contributor"! You cannot claim that QF cares only about direct utility of the contributor, but then go on and set that direct utility to 0, claiming QF didn't care about it.

[imtringued]

If you value saving lives at a rate of $100,000 worth of utility and a cost of $100,000, then quadratic funding makes you [0] pay $150,000 of money for $100,000 worth of utility.

Make sure to carefully read articles before dismissing them twice. Thank you.

[0] you = your contribution + a magical subsidy (presumably paid by you indirectly)

[nkmnz]

The problem with the article is that they did not make the point you are conveying here.

They say: 1. QF cares only about direct utility 2. $saving a life brings $100,000 of INdirect utility for society and/or the person who's life is saved 3. we (again: who?!) don't care about the direct utility in this case

I have no idea how you can wrap your head around the idea that this is a good representation of any valid critique.

Btw, I think QF is stupid, but that's not the point here.

[Certhas]

What an uncharitable reply. Not op, but you seem to miss the basic point of the article, I.e. you fail at your own criterion of making understanding your goal.

As someone not in this space I found the argument succinct and easy to follow. QF is optimal if you only have direct utility. To illustrate that this assumption is problematic, confront it with a hypothetical where direct utility is zero. Then you can clearly and immediately see that in this hypothetical it's not optimal.

Maybe the argument is hard to parse if you're not used to reading theoretical literature?

[nkmnz]

But OP did not follow his own terms: he refuses to take the direct utility of giving your money to charity into account and instead calculates some arbitrary utility of the saved lives, which is indirect utility.

[gowld]

Do you have any evidence that these supposed assumptions exist?

No one donates $100K to the opera because they enjoy attending opera $1M worth. It's absurd to accuse any opera organization of assuming that.

Someone buys a ticket to the opera for $100 because they enjoy attending opera >$100 worth. They donate $100K because they want other people to enjoy opera, or for personal advertising purposes, not charitable social purposes.

[jwarden]

> Do you have any evidence that these supposed assumptions exist?

By existing, so you mean “hold in reality?”

The point of the article is that the assumption that underly QF do not hold in reality.

[andrewflnr]

I believe they were asking for evidence that (significant numbers of) people hold those assumptions.

[TJSomething]

I don't think the author was claiming that significant number of people hold those assumptions. I thought the assumption was that the most people implementing QF believe that QF is optimal for their use case. However, the author's observed use cases tend to not match the preconditions for QF's optimality.

[jwarden]

Exactly.