(1) “we seem to be hitting diminishing returns in outreach encouraging more people to apply to advising...” (page 7 under current challenges)
and again
(2) “overall, we’d guess that 80,000 Hours continued to see diminishing returns to its impact per staff member per year.” (on page 10 under impact evaluation)
What is the strategy/argument for “expand the team” being the best intervention for increasing organizational outreach and subsequent impact? Is it really just a capacity issue or could it be a scope issue?
Thanks for the question. To be clear, we do think growing the team will significantly increase our impact in expectation.
We do see diminishing returns on several areas of investment, but having diminishing returns is consistent with significantly increasing impact.
Not all of our impact is captured in these metrics. For example, if we were to hire to increase the quality of our written advice even while maintaining the same number of website engagement hours, we’d expect our impact to increase (though this is of course hard to measure).
In our view, investments in 80k’s growth are still well above the cost-effectiveness bar for similar types of organisations and interventions in the problem areas we work on.
Hey John, unfortunately a lot of the data we use to assess our impact contains people’s personal details or comes from others’ analyses that we’re not able to share. As such, it is hard for me to give a sense of how many times more cost-effective we think our marginal spending is compared with the community funding bar.
But the original post includes various details about assessments of our impact, including the plan changes we’ve tracked, placements made, the EA survey, and the Open Philanthropy survey. We will be working on our annual review in spring 2024 and may have more details to share about the impact of our programmes then.
If you are interested in reading about our perspective on our historical cost-effectiveness from our 2019 annual review, you can do so here.
Equally curious about the push to grow the team if not seeing significant increase in impact, especially given the $2M marketing push this past year.
In 80K’s 2021-2022 Review it mentioned:
(1) “we seem to be hitting diminishing returns in outreach encouraging more people to apply to advising...” (page 7 under current challenges)
and again
(2) “overall, we’d guess that 80,000 Hours continued to see diminishing returns to its impact per staff member per year.” (on page 10 under impact evaluation)
What is the strategy/argument for “expand the team” being the best intervention for increasing organizational outreach and subsequent impact? Is it really just a capacity issue or could it be a scope issue?
Thanks for the question. To be clear, we do think growing the team will significantly increase our impact in expectation.
We do see diminishing returns on several areas of investment, but having diminishing returns is consistent with significantly increasing impact.
Not all of our impact is captured in these metrics. For example, if we were to hire to increase the quality of our written advice even while maintaining the same number of website engagement hours, we’d expect our impact to increase (though this is of course hard to measure).
In our view, investments in 80k’s growth are still well above the cost-effectiveness bar for similar types of organisations and interventions in the problem areas we work on.
I think this comment would be more persuasive if it shared some evidence or reasoning as to why its claims are likely true
Hey John, unfortunately a lot of the data we use to assess our impact contains people’s personal details or comes from others’ analyses that we’re not able to share. As such, it is hard for me to give a sense of how many times more cost-effective we think our marginal spending is compared with the community funding bar.
But the original post includes various details about assessments of our impact, including the plan changes we’ve tracked, placements made, the EA survey, and the Open Philanthropy survey. We will be working on our annual review in spring 2024 and may have more details to share about the impact of our programmes then.
If you are interested in reading about our perspective on our historical cost-effectiveness from our 2019 annual review, you can do so here.