I think this is true as a response in certain cases, but many philanthropic interventions probably aren’t tried enough times to get the sample size and lots of communities are small. It’s pretty easy to imagine a situation like:
You and a handful of other people make some positive EV bets.
The median outcome from doing this is the world is worse, and all of the attempts at these bets end up neutral or negative.
The positive EV is never realized and the world is worse on average, despite both the individuals and the ecosystem being +EV.
It seems like this response would imply you should only do EV maximization if your movement is large (or that its impact is reliably predictable if the movement is large).
But I do think this is a fair point overall — though you could imagine a large system of interventions with the same features I describe that would have the same issues as a whole.
I think this is true as a response in certain cases, but many philanthropic interventions probably aren’t tried enough times to get the sample size and lots of communities are small. It’s pretty easy to imagine a situation like:
You and a handful of other people make some positive EV bets.
The median outcome from doing this is the world is worse, and all of the attempts at these bets end up neutral or negative.
The positive EV is never realized and the world is worse on average, despite both the individuals and the ecosystem being +EV.
It seems like this response would imply you should only do EV maximization if your movement is large (or that its impact is reliably predictable if the movement is large).
But I do think this is a fair point overall — though you could imagine a large system of interventions with the same features I describe that would have the same issues as a whole.