Thanks for this post! I found it quite interesting and useful.
One thing that stood out to me in particular was the distinction you made between exogenous learning and endogenous learning. It often seems hard to tease apart ādoing good nowāāor whatever we wish to call itāfrom āpunting to the futureā, and to determine which is better. And this seems to in part be due to the ways that doing good now can also help us do good later, and thus have similar effects to punting. (I plan to write a post related to this soon.) So I think that future discussions on the topic can likely benefit from that explicit conceptual distinction between how our knowledge will improve if we simply wait and how our knowledge will improve if we do something that improves our knowledge.
I also liked the distinction between changes in availability of opportunities and changes in how much we know about opportunities (learning), for similar reasons.
It happens to be that I was also working on a post with a somewhat similar scope to this one, and to some extent to Michael Dickensā post. My post was already drafted, but not published, and is entitled Crucial questions about optimal timing of work and donations. Iād say the key differences in scope are that my draft surveys a somewhat broader set of questions, and makes less of an effort to actually provide estimates or recommendations (it more so overviews some important questions and arguments, without taking a stance).
My draftās marginal value is probably lower than Iād expected, given that this good work by you and Dickens has now been published! But feel free to take a look, in case it might be usefulāand Iād also welcome feedback. (That goes for both Sjir and other readers.)
I suspect what Iāll do is make a few tweaks to my draft in light of the two new posts, and then publish it as another perspective or way of framing things, despite some overlap in content and purpose.
Thanks for this post! I found it quite interesting and useful.
One thing that stood out to me in particular was the distinction you made between exogenous learning and endogenous learning. It often seems hard to tease apart ādoing good nowāāor whatever we wish to call itāfrom āpunting to the futureā, and to determine which is better. And this seems to in part be due to the ways that doing good now can also help us do good later, and thus have similar effects to punting. (I plan to write a post related to this soon.) So I think that future discussions on the topic can likely benefit from that explicit conceptual distinction between how our knowledge will improve if we simply wait and how our knowledge will improve if we do something that improves our knowledge.
I also liked the distinction between changes in availability of opportunities and changes in how much we know about opportunities (learning), for similar reasons.
It happens to be that I was also working on a post with a somewhat similar scope to this one, and to some extent to Michael Dickensā post. My post was already drafted, but not published, and is entitled Crucial questions about optimal timing of work and donations. Iād say the key differences in scope are that my draft surveys a somewhat broader set of questions, and makes less of an effort to actually provide estimates or recommendations (it more so overviews some important questions and arguments, without taking a stance).
My draftās marginal value is probably lower than Iād expected, given that this good work by you and Dickens has now been published! But feel free to take a look, in case it might be usefulāand Iād also welcome feedback. (That goes for both Sjir and other readers.)
I suspect what Iāll do is make a few tweaks to my draft in light of the two new posts, and then publish it as another perspective or way of framing things, despite some overlap in content and purpose.
Thank you MichaelA; happy to hear this was useful to you. I look forward to reading your post as well.