Thanks for writing this! The fact that it highlights a premise in EA (“some ways of doing good are much better than others”) that a lot of people (myself included) take without very careful consideration makes me happy that it’s been written.
Having said that, I am not sure that I believe this more generally because of the reasoning that you give: “well if it’s true even there [in global health] where we can measure carefully, it’s probably more true in the general case”. I think this is part of my belief, but the other part is that just directly comparing the naive expected value of interventions in different cause areas makes this seem true.
For example, under some views of comparing animal welfare to humans, it seems far more impactful to donate to cage-free hen corporate outreach campaigns which per dollar, affects between 9 and 120 years of chicken life, compared to AMF. Further, my impression is that considering the expected value of longtermist interventions also would represent quite a large difference.
This is partially why I try to advocate for members of my group to develop their own cause-prioritization.
Thanks for writing this! The fact that it highlights a premise in EA (“some ways of doing good are much better than others”) that a lot of people (myself included) take without very careful consideration makes me happy that it’s been written.
Having said that, I am not sure that I believe this more generally because of the reasoning that you give: “well if it’s true even there [in global health] where we can measure carefully, it’s probably more true in the general case”. I think this is part of my belief, but the other part is that just directly comparing the naive expected value of interventions in different cause areas makes this seem true.
For example, under some views of comparing animal welfare to humans, it seems far more impactful to donate to cage-free hen corporate outreach campaigns which per dollar, affects between 9 and 120 years of chicken life, compared to AMF. Further, my impression is that considering the expected value of longtermist interventions also would represent quite a large difference.
This is partially why I try to advocate for members of my group to develop their own cause-prioritization.