I initially found myself nodding in agreement but then I realised a confusion I have:
Why should a donor/grantmaker limit their consideration of what is most underfunded to the EA community?
After all, the EA community is a nebulous community with porous boundaries. E.g. we count Open Phil, but what about The Navigation Fund? Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation? And even if we can define the boundaries, what do we actually gain by focusing on this specific subset of donors?
If you instead focus on ‘what is most underfunded at the global level’ then the question returns to the same broad question of cause prioritisation (“your value system’s most preferred causes”).
I think that’s a great point! Theoretically, we should count all of those foundations and more, since they’re all parts of “the portfolio of everyone’s actions”. (Though this would simply further cement the takeaway that global health is overfunded.)
Some reasons for focusing our optimization on “EA’s portfolio” specifically:
Believing that non-EA-aligned actions have negligible effect compared to EA-aligned actions.
Since we wouldn’t have planned to donate to ineffective interventions/cause areas anyway, it’s unclear what effect including those in the portfolio would have on our decisionmaking, which is one reason why they may be safely ignorable.
It’s far more tractable to derive EA’s portfolio than the portfolio of everyone’s actions, or even the portfolio of everyone’s charitable giving.
But I agree that these reasons aren’t necessarily decisive. I just think there are enough reasons to do so, and this assumption has enough simplifying power, that for me it’s worth making.
Focusing solely in EAs has a bunch of weird effects though.
E.g. I’ve been thinking about some ‘safeguarding democracy’ type interventions for longtermist reasons. If I looked at EA funding I’d presumably conclude that the area was massively underfunded—almost no one working on this. Whereas looking in a global sense the initial impression is that it’s a very large, well-funded area. (Maybe it’s still a useful heuristic though because explicitly longtermist funding and effort might focus on quite different subcomponents of the broad topic?)
And another one is just that how liberal you are in your definitions of what’s EA or not can make quite a big difference. E.g. plausibly by a factor of 2 in the case of animal advocacy.
Another consideration I just encountered in a grantmaking decision:
Other decision-makers in EA might be those views we are most inclined to defer to or cooperate with. So upon noticing that an opportunity is underfunded in EA specifically but not the world at large, arguably I should update away from wanting to fund it upon considering Open Phil and EA donations specifically as opposed to donations in the world more broadly. Whereas I think the thrust of your post implies the opposite.
(@Ariel Simnegar 🔸, although again no need to reply. Possibly I’m getting in an unnecessary tangle by considering this ‘EA spending vs world spending’ lens)
I initially found myself nodding in agreement but then I realised a confusion I have:
Why should a donor/grantmaker limit their consideration of what is most underfunded to the EA community?
After all, the EA community is a nebulous community with porous boundaries. E.g. we count Open Phil, but what about The Navigation Fund? Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation? And even if we can define the boundaries, what do we actually gain by focusing on this specific subset of donors?
If you instead focus on ‘what is most underfunded at the global level’ then the question returns to the same broad question of cause prioritisation (“your value system’s most preferred causes”).
I think that’s a great point! Theoretically, we should count all of those foundations and more, since they’re all parts of “the portfolio of everyone’s actions”. (Though this would simply further cement the takeaway that global health is overfunded.)
Some reasons for focusing our optimization on “EA’s portfolio” specifically:
Believing that non-EA-aligned actions have negligible effect compared to EA-aligned actions.
Since we wouldn’t have planned to donate to ineffective interventions/cause areas anyway, it’s unclear what effect including those in the portfolio would have on our decisionmaking, which is one reason why they may be safely ignorable.
It’s far more tractable to derive EA’s portfolio than the portfolio of everyone’s actions, or even the portfolio of everyone’s charitable giving.
But I agree that these reasons aren’t necessarily decisive. I just think there are enough reasons to do so, and this assumption has enough simplifying power, that for me it’s worth making.
Yeah it might be more tractable.
Focusing solely in EAs has a bunch of weird effects though.
E.g. I’ve been thinking about some ‘safeguarding democracy’ type interventions for longtermist reasons. If I looked at EA funding I’d presumably conclude that the area was massively underfunded—almost no one working on this. Whereas looking in a global sense the initial impression is that it’s a very large, well-funded area. (Maybe it’s still a useful heuristic though because explicitly longtermist funding and effort might focus on quite different subcomponents of the broad topic?)
And another one is just that how liberal you are in your definitions of what’s EA or not can make quite a big difference. E.g. plausibly by a factor of 2 in the case of animal advocacy.
(No need to reply, I’m just musing.)
Thanks!
Another consideration I just encountered in a grantmaking decision:
Other decision-makers in EA might be those views we are most inclined to defer to or cooperate with. So upon noticing that an opportunity is underfunded in EA specifically but not the world at large, arguably I should update away from wanting to fund it upon considering Open Phil and EA donations specifically as opposed to donations in the world more broadly. Whereas I think the thrust of your post implies the opposite.
(@Ariel Simnegar 🔸, although again no need to reply. Possibly I’m getting in an unnecessary tangle by considering this ‘EA spending vs world spending’ lens)