I believe the framing in the 80,000 Hours podcast was something like when we run out of targeted things to do. But if we include global warming, depending on your temperature increase limit, we could easily spend $1 trillion per year. If people in developed countries make around $30,000 a year and they donate 10% of that, that would require about 300 million people. And of course there are many other global catastrophic risks. So I think it’s going to be a long time before we run out of targeted things to do. But it could be good to do some combination of everyday longtermism and targeted interventions.
I spent a little while thinking about this. My guess is that of the activities I list:
Alice and Bob’s efforts look comparable to donating (in external benefit/effort) when the longtermist portfolio is around $100B-$1T/year
Clara’s efforts looks comparable to donating when the longtermist portfolio is around $1B-$10B/year
Diya’s efforts look comparable to donating when the longtermist portfolio is around $10B-$100B/year
Elmo’s efforts are harder to say because they’re closer to directly trying to grow longtermist support, so the value diminishes as the existing portfolio gets larger just as for donations, and it more depends on underlying quality
All of those numbers are super crude and I might well disagree with myself if I came back later and estimated again. They also depend on lots of details (like how good the individuals are at executing on those strategies).
Perhaps most importantly, they’re excluding the internal benefits—if these activities are (as I suggest) partly good for practicing some longtermist judgement, then I’d really want to see them as a complement to donation rather than just a competitor.
I believe the framing in the 80,000 Hours podcast was something like when we run out of targeted things to do. But if we include global warming, depending on your temperature increase limit, we could easily spend $1 trillion per year. If people in developed countries make around $30,000 a year and they donate 10% of that, that would require about 300 million people. And of course there are many other global catastrophic risks. So I think it’s going to be a long time before we run out of targeted things to do. But it could be good to do some combination of everyday longtermism and targeted interventions.
Agree—I think an interesting challenge is “when does this become better than donating 10% to the top marginal charity?”
I spent a little while thinking about this. My guess is that of the activities I list:
Alice and Bob’s efforts look comparable to donating (in external benefit/effort) when the longtermist portfolio is around $100B-$1T/year
Clara’s efforts looks comparable to donating when the longtermist portfolio is around $1B-$10B/year
Diya’s efforts look comparable to donating when the longtermist portfolio is around $10B-$100B/year
Elmo’s efforts are harder to say because they’re closer to directly trying to grow longtermist support, so the value diminishes as the existing portfolio gets larger just as for donations, and it more depends on underlying quality
All of those numbers are super crude and I might well disagree with myself if I came back later and estimated again. They also depend on lots of details (like how good the individuals are at executing on those strategies).
Perhaps most importantly, they’re excluding the internal benefits—if these activities are (as I suggest) partly good for practicing some longtermist judgement, then I’d really want to see them as a complement to donation rather than just a competitor.