Well if the best animal charities are 250x better than the best human charities then a 1-in-250 chance of picking the best animal charity implies that it’s just as good as completely certain donations to the best human charity.
That would only be true if there were no charities of negative value that you might accidentally pick.
Assuming a reasonable prior about the effects of charities, if there are a few at 250x then there are also more at 200x, 150x and 100x that we are likely to fund, but the chance that we would accidentally pick a harmful charity when we think we are picking the best one is tiny if we know anything about charities. Even granting an assumption of being totally ignorant about charities and picking randomly, to argue that human charities are better you would have to assume that for every effort which is +250, there is an effort which is at least as bad as −249, and for every effort which is +200, there is an effort which is at least as bad as −199, or at least an average which has the same effect—with almost half of animal charities being net negative.
Note that in that case you would be arguing that the vast majority of the perceived superiority of animal charities is due simply to variance. That seems false because we have strong reasons to expect animal charities to be fundamentally more effective due to the neglectedness of the issue and the intensity of the problem, and I don’t see any prior reason to expect animal charities to be more variable in effectiveness than human charities.
Even granting an assumption of being totally ignorant about charities and picking randomly, to argue that human charities are better you would have to assume that for every effort which is +250, there is an effort which is at least as bad as −249
You don’t necessarily have to assume the impacts are normally distributed around 0 -- they could take a wide variety of distributions.
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I don’t see any prior reason to expect animal charities to be more variable in effectiveness than human charities.
Why not? It seems much easier to be accidentally counterproductive in animal rights advocacy than in global health.
You don’t necessarily have to assume the impacts are normally distributed around 0 -- they could take a wide variety of distributions.
Yes, like I said: “or at least an average which has the same effect”. Whatever distribution you assume would be implausible. Either there’s just a few animal charities which are horrifically bad, like thousands of times worse than the best human charities are good… or the vast, vast majority of animal charities account for some kind of moderate harm.
Why not? It seems much easier to be accidentally counterproductive in animal rights advocacy than in global health.
Global health efforts do have controversial outcomes, and animal advocacy efforts are mostly advancing on mutually supporting fronts of changing ideas and behavior. I really don’t see where this seeming-ness comes from, especially not the degree of seeming-ness that would be needed to indicate that the variance of animal charities is ten or twenty or a hundred times greater than that of human charities.
That would only be true if there were no charities of negative value that you might accidentally pick.
Assuming a reasonable prior about the effects of charities, if there are a few at 250x then there are also more at 200x, 150x and 100x that we are likely to fund, but the chance that we would accidentally pick a harmful charity when we think we are picking the best one is tiny if we know anything about charities. Even granting an assumption of being totally ignorant about charities and picking randomly, to argue that human charities are better you would have to assume that for every effort which is +250, there is an effort which is at least as bad as −249, and for every effort which is +200, there is an effort which is at least as bad as −199, or at least an average which has the same effect—with almost half of animal charities being net negative.
Note that in that case you would be arguing that the vast majority of the perceived superiority of animal charities is due simply to variance. That seems false because we have strong reasons to expect animal charities to be fundamentally more effective due to the neglectedness of the issue and the intensity of the problem, and I don’t see any prior reason to expect animal charities to be more variable in effectiveness than human charities.
You don’t necessarily have to assume the impacts are normally distributed around 0 -- they could take a wide variety of distributions.
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Why not? It seems much easier to be accidentally counterproductive in animal rights advocacy than in global health.
Yes, like I said: “or at least an average which has the same effect”. Whatever distribution you assume would be implausible. Either there’s just a few animal charities which are horrifically bad, like thousands of times worse than the best human charities are good… or the vast, vast majority of animal charities account for some kind of moderate harm.
Global health efforts do have controversial outcomes, and animal advocacy efforts are mostly advancing on mutually supporting fronts of changing ideas and behavior. I really don’t see where this seeming-ness comes from, especially not the degree of seeming-ness that would be needed to indicate that the variance of animal charities is ten or twenty or a hundred times greater than that of human charities.