Zahara’s trying to maximize her chance of a 10% increase in her altruistic output.
I agree it’s a good idea to focus on small gains. Even better advice might be to focus on learning or building skills which might give Zahara a 10% increase in her altruistic output later on (e.g. focus on studying, learn something new, try and find a job which means she’ll learn a lot).
You could apply the same idea to donating 0% or 1% this year. It’s also fine to donate 0% for several years and then give when you’re more comfortable.
In general, I think EAs (myself included) are too focused on generating impact today and should focus more on building skills to generate impact later on.
Unfortunately this competes with the importance of interventions failing fast. If it’s going to take several years before the expected benefits of an intervention are clearly distinguishable from noise, there is a high risk that you’ll waste a lot of time on it before finding out it didn’t actually help, you won’t be able to experiment with different variants of the intervention to find out which work best, and even if you’re confident it will help you might find it infeasible to maintain motivation when the reward feedback loop is so long.
Sorry, perhaps this wasn’t clear—I’m not suggesting investing heavily in a single intervention or cause area for a long time, rather building skills that will be useful for solving a variety of problems (e.g. research skills, experience working in teams etc.).
Thanks for this really thoughtful post :)
I agree it’s a good idea to focus on small gains. Even better advice might be to focus on learning or building skills which might give Zahara a 10% increase in her altruistic output later on (e.g. focus on studying, learn something new, try and find a job which means she’ll learn a lot).
You could apply the same idea to donating 0% or 1% this year. It’s also fine to donate 0% for several years and then give when you’re more comfortable.
In general, I think EAs (myself included) are too focused on generating impact today and should focus more on building skills to generate impact later on.
Unfortunately this competes with the importance of interventions failing fast. If it’s going to take several years before the expected benefits of an intervention are clearly distinguishable from noise, there is a high risk that you’ll waste a lot of time on it before finding out it didn’t actually help, you won’t be able to experiment with different variants of the intervention to find out which work best, and even if you’re confident it will help you might find it infeasible to maintain motivation when the reward feedback loop is so long.
Sorry, perhaps this wasn’t clear—I’m not suggesting investing heavily in a single intervention or cause area for a long time, rather building skills that will be useful for solving a variety of problems (e.g. research skills, experience working in teams etc.).