I think when it comes to how you would make your charity more effective at helping others, I agree it’s not easy. I completely agree with your example about it being difficult to know which possible hires would be good at the job. I think you know much better than I do what is important to make 240Project go well.
But I think we can use reasoning to identify what plans are more likely to lead to good outcomes, even if we can’t measure them to be sure. For example, working to address problems that are particularly large in scale, tractable and have been unfairly neglected seems very likely to lead to better objective outcomes than focusing on a more local and difficult-to-solve problem (read more at https://80000hours.org/articles/your-choice-of-problem-is-crucial/).
Another relevant idea might be a “hits based” approach, where there’s a smaller chance of success, but the successful outcome would be so good that its expected value is better than (say) the best GiveWell-style measurable approach.
To be completely clear, I’m not saying I think you’re making a mistake if the reason for focusing on people struggling in the UK is either that you want to help people but don’t mind about how big a difference you make (you clearly are helping!), or if you definitely want to work on something you have an emotional connection to. But if your goal is to help other people as best you can, then that’s where the EA approach makes a lot of sense :)
Put another way, I completely agree that there are serious problems in all places, including in wealthy countries—but I don’t prioritise working on helping people in the UK because (a) I want my efforts to help others as much as possible, (b) it’s clear that I can help much more by focusing on other problems and (c) I don’t see a reason to prioritise helping people just because they happen to live near me. If you disagree with any of those, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to keep focusing on people in the UK! But I think on reflection, many people actually do want to help others as best they can[1].
It is surprisingly emotionally difficult to realise that even though the thing you are working on is hugely important (and EA doesn’t at all disagree with that), there are other problems that might deserve your attention even more. It took me a while to come around to that, and I think it is psychologically difficult to deal with the uncertainty of suddenly being open to the possibility of working on something quite different than your old plan.
One caveat is that although I mostly want to do the EA thing of making the biggest difference possible, I also do separately sometimes want to do something that makes me really feel like I’m making a difference, like volunteering to address a problem near me, and that’s obviously fine too, it’s just a different goal! We all have multiple goals.
Thanks for the thoughtful response!
I think when it comes to how you would make your charity more effective at helping others, I agree it’s not easy. I completely agree with your example about it being difficult to know which possible hires would be good at the job. I think you know much better than I do what is important to make 240Project go well.
But I think we can use reasoning to identify what plans are more likely to lead to good outcomes, even if we can’t measure them to be sure. For example, working to address problems that are particularly large in scale, tractable and have been unfairly neglected seems very likely to lead to better objective outcomes than focusing on a more local and difficult-to-solve problem (read more at https://80000hours.org/articles/your-choice-of-problem-is-crucial/).
Another relevant idea might be a “hits based” approach, where there’s a smaller chance of success, but the successful outcome would be so good that its expected value is better than (say) the best GiveWell-style measurable approach.
To be completely clear, I’m not saying I think you’re making a mistake if the reason for focusing on people struggling in the UK is either that you want to help people but don’t mind about how big a difference you make (you clearly are helping!), or if you definitely want to work on something you have an emotional connection to. But if your goal is to help other people as best you can, then that’s where the EA approach makes a lot of sense :)
Put another way, I completely agree that there are serious problems in all places, including in wealthy countries—but I don’t prioritise working on helping people in the UK because (a) I want my efforts to help others as much as possible, (b) it’s clear that I can help much more by focusing on other problems and (c) I don’t see a reason to prioritise helping people just because they happen to live near me. If you disagree with any of those, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to keep focusing on people in the UK! But I think on reflection, many people actually do want to help others as best they can[1].
It is surprisingly emotionally difficult to realise that even though the thing you are working on is hugely important (and EA doesn’t at all disagree with that), there are other problems that might deserve your attention even more. It took me a while to come around to that, and I think it is psychologically difficult to deal with the uncertainty of suddenly being open to the possibility of working on something quite different than your old plan.
One caveat is that although I mostly want to do the EA thing of making the biggest difference possible, I also do separately sometimes want to do something that makes me really feel like I’m making a difference, like volunteering to address a problem near me, and that’s obviously fine too, it’s just a different goal! We all have multiple goals.