I’m not sure about the precise meaning of “undoing the good done” here.
For instance, there were multiple points at which single people’s actions likely prevented Harvard College Effective Altruism from dying. If I sold you mine, it would seem that I should value it equal to the entire long-term humanitarian consequences of HCEA’s output. But if John Sturm sold you his, he should put the same valuation on it, and then you would have overpaid.
I probably won’t sell you any of HCEA—information asymmetry suggests it would be hard for us to agree on a price—but I figure this is probably a pretty common concern.
We don’t expect to fund any collaborative projects, or projects where the impact of one project is so contingent on a complementary response by specific other people. Does that clear up most of the ambiguity?
In principle this kind of complementarity happens for most projects to some small extent; in practice I expect we’ll be able to focus on impacts that stand on their own.
Note that if no contributor to HCEA had other particular people in mind, then the undoing interpretation seems fine. We can just look sequentially, and e.g. discount the first contributions based on the probability that the project would fizzle—the total impact should still add up to 1. When things are complementary in the wider world, this seems like the usual case.
The same problem arises whenever there are returns to scale, and marginal impacts exceed average impacts. This comes up all of the time in the for-profit sector. There the approach is essentially the same: collaborative projects have to allocate profits to the contributors somehow, and we use that rather than marginal impacts in order to determine compensation. At the super-firm level, returns to scale manifest as unpriced externalities; so we use contracts to organize tightly complementary activities, and then we underprovide unpriced externalities.
Kudos for putting your money where your mouth is!
I’m not sure about the precise meaning of “undoing the good done” here.
For instance, there were multiple points at which single people’s actions likely prevented Harvard College Effective Altruism from dying. If I sold you mine, it would seem that I should value it equal to the entire long-term humanitarian consequences of HCEA’s output. But if John Sturm sold you his, he should put the same valuation on it, and then you would have overpaid.
I probably won’t sell you any of HCEA—information asymmetry suggests it would be hard for us to agree on a price—but I figure this is probably a pretty common concern.
We don’t expect to fund any collaborative projects, or projects where the impact of one project is so contingent on a complementary response by specific other people. Does that clear up most of the ambiguity?
In principle this kind of complementarity happens for most projects to some small extent; in practice I expect we’ll be able to focus on impacts that stand on their own.
Note that if no contributor to HCEA had other particular people in mind, then the undoing interpretation seems fine. We can just look sequentially, and e.g. discount the first contributions based on the probability that the project would fizzle—the total impact should still add up to 1. When things are complementary in the wider world, this seems like the usual case.
The same problem arises whenever there are returns to scale, and marginal impacts exceed average impacts. This comes up all of the time in the for-profit sector. There the approach is essentially the same: collaborative projects have to allocate profits to the contributors somehow, and we use that rather than marginal impacts in order to determine compensation. At the super-firm level, returns to scale manifest as unpriced externalities; so we use contracts to organize tightly complementary activities, and then we underprovide unpriced externalities.