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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

n.b. This argument is ~exactly the same for donating your time to charities. The current company which you sell your services to has a way to metabolize them and will pay you (presumptively high) market wages for doing so; a charity chosen randomly by you at a time convenient to you may have no infrastructure to metabolize your services nor a charity-perceptible need for e.g. web development.

If you're feeling charitable you can virtually always find a charity amenable to you which has outcomes they'd like to cause in the world but for lack of money and help them vis the lack of money.

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This really is not exactly the same. For nonprofits that do things like run big events, it's often a lot better to have 15 motivated event volunteers than 15 part-time temps hired for the day. They're about equal in skill, but one is free and actually cares about the cause.

I say this as someone who was involved in organizing many large events for an animal advocacy org in the Twin Cities metro.

Volunteers are also better at many other tasks such as outreach, for example handing out leaflets. For that sort of thing you need a lot of bodies, and people who care about the cause will do a much better job.

I say this as someone who spent about 19 years helping run a local animal advocacy org in the Twin Cities metro. Ironically, what we could have spent money on was hiring staff to reduce the load on people like me ;)

This is called "effective altruism"; you are more effective if you maximize your skills and then turn the profits of those skills over to a charity.

The only argument against it is that people tend seek out and perform charity work for their own sake (eg. vanity, restitution, relaxation).

Unless your skills happen to be those that a charity could make good use of. Someone has to do the work in the end.

Charities are usually focused around the bottom of mazlow’s hierarchy of needs, that is, food-shelter-water.

You don’t need skilled and educated people to dig wells, build houses, stock shelves, fold clothing, serve food, etc. These jobs can be done for the minimum wage or by people outside of the workforce (youth and elderly).

I kind of disagree with charities that get so big that they need skilled workers. If your charity gets that big, it should just become a social program as part of the government. Like why is Red Cross a charity? That should be an arm of the UN, not a private entity.

Some charities are food-shelter-water. Other charities are, for example, medical or legal aid for particularly burdened communities.

And even for food-shelter-water you need someone deciding where to dig the wells, what to stock on the shelves, what food is most cost-effective and nutritious in bulk. And building houses definitely isn't unskilled; it's manual labor but that doesn't mean there's no skill involved.

As someone with a desk job, mindlessly sorting cans for an hour actually seems relaxing.

I pick through boxes of potatoes/carrots, throwing out the bad ones and bagging up the good ones, then throwing those bag into another box. I do things like this for 2 hours on the weekend at a local charity called harvesters.org. At the end I've worked up a sweat, but it's quite relaxing and I always meet friendly people there to chat with.

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