The title and central claim of the post seems wrong, though my guess is you mean it poetically (but poetry that isn’t true is I think worse, though IDK, it’s fine sometimes, maybe it makes more sense to other people).
Clearly the dollars you own are the most valuable. If you think someone else could do more with your dollars, you can just give them your dollars! This isn’t guaranteed to be true (you might not know who would ex-ante best use dollars, but still think you could learn about that ex-post and regret not giving them your money after the opportunity has passed), but I think it’s almost always true.
The correct title and argument would be “influencing other people’s donation decisions is often more valuable than improving your own”, but I think that is a very different claim from the title and central bolded sentence.
“Thinking someone else’s dollars are more valuable than your own” would IMO clearly imply that you would prefer the world where they had more money, and you had less money. But that’s not what the post is talking about (and is I think wrong in almost all cases). Or maybe alternatively that you would prefer having their dollars instead of your current dollars (though given that dollars are fungible, that seems kind of weird).
FWIW given the context of previous discussions on the EA Forum, I read the title as meaning something like “influencing other people’s donation decisions is often more valuable than improving your own” when I saw it on the frontpage.
I agree that this is what the post is about, but the title and this[1] sentence do indeed not mean that, under any straightforward interpretation I can think of. I think bad post titles are quite costly (cf. lots of fallout from “politics is the mindkiller” being misapplied over the years), and good post titles are quite valuable.
“This points to an important conclusion: The most valuable dollars to aren’t owned by us. They’re owned by people who currently either don’t donate at all, or who donate to charities that are orders of magnitude less effective than the ones we typically discuss here.
I don’t think anyone uses “valuable” in that way. Saying “the most valuable cars are owned by Jeff Bezos” doesn’t mean that in-aggregate all of his cars are more valuable than other people’s cars. It means that the individual cars that Jeff Bezos owns are more valuable than other cars.
The title and central claim of the post seems wrong, though my guess is you mean it poetically (but poetry that isn’t true is I think worse, though IDK, it’s fine sometimes, maybe it makes more sense to other people).
Clearly the dollars you own are the most valuable. If you think someone else could do more with your dollars, you can just give them your dollars! This isn’t guaranteed to be true (you might not know who would ex-ante best use dollars, but still think you could learn about that ex-post and regret not giving them your money after the opportunity has passed), but I think it’s almost always true.
The correct title and argument would be “influencing other people’s donation decisions is often more valuable than improving your own”, but I think that is a very different claim from the title and central bolded sentence.
“Thinking someone else’s dollars are more valuable than your own” would IMO clearly imply that you would prefer the world where they had more money, and you had less money. But that’s not what the post is talking about (and is I think wrong in almost all cases). Or maybe alternatively that you would prefer having their dollars instead of your current dollars (though given that dollars are fungible, that seems kind of weird).
FWIW given the context of previous discussions on the EA Forum, I read the title as meaning something like “influencing other people’s donation decisions is often more valuable than improving your own” when I saw it on the frontpage.
I agree that this is what the post is about, but the title and this[1] sentence do indeed not mean that, under any straightforward interpretation I can think of. I think bad post titles are quite costly (cf. lots of fallout from “politics is the mindkiller” being misapplied over the years), and good post titles are quite valuable.
“This points to an important conclusion: The most valuable dollars to aren’t owned by us. They’re owned by people who currently either don’t donate at all, or who donate to charities that are orders of magnitude less effective than the ones we typically discuss here.
I think there might be a confusion here. Your claim is that the dollars we own are more valuable per dollar
But the post is referring to the overall amount of dollars. Eg Jeff Bezos dollars might be more valuable than mine.
I don’t think anyone uses “valuable” in that way. Saying “the most valuable cars are owned by Jeff Bezos” doesn’t mean that in-aggregate all of his cars are more valuable than other people’s cars. It means that the individual cars that Jeff Bezos owns are more valuable than other cars.