Illegible impact is, by comparison, invisible, like helping a friend who, without your help, might have been too depressed to get a better job and donate more money to effective charities or filling a seat in the room at an EA Global talk such that the speaker feels marginally more rewarded for having done the work they are talking about and marginally incentives them to do more. Illegible impact is either hard or impossible to measure or thereās no agreed upon model suggesting the action is correlated with impact. And the examples I gave are not maximally illegible because they had to be legible enough for me to explain them to you; the really invisible stuff is like dark matterāwe can see signs of its existence (good stuff happens in the world) but we canāt tell you much about what it is (no model of how the good stuff happened).
The alluring trap is thinking that illegible impact is not impact and that legible impact is the only thing that matters.
This reminded me of the interesting post Illegible impact is still impact. An excerpt: