Are you neglecting to count the negative impact from causing other people to do the suboptimal thing? If I use my funds to set up an exploding matching grant that will divert the funds of other donors from better things too a less effective charity, that is a negative part of my impact.
Yes, that’s right. I agree that a perfect calculation of your counterfactual impact would do the right thing in this scenario, and probably all scenarios. This is an empirical claim that the actual impact calculations that meta-orgs do are of the form that I wrote in my previous comment.
For example, consider the impact calculations that GWWC and other meta orgs have. If those impact calculations (with their current methodologies) showed a ratio of 1.1:1, that seems nominally worthwhile (you still have the multiplicative impact), but I would expect that it would be better to give directly to charities to avoid effects like the ones Joey talked about in his post.
A true full counterfactual impact calculation would consider the world in which GWWC just sends the money straight to charities and convinces other meta orgs to do the same, at which point they see that more money gets donated to charities in total, and so they all close operations and send money straight to charities. I’m arguing that this doesn’t happen in practice. (I think Joey and Peter are arguing the same thing.)
Are you neglecting to count the negative impact from causing other people to do the suboptimal thing? If I use my funds to set up an exploding matching grant that will divert the funds of other donors from better things too a less effective charity, that is a negative part of my impact.
Yes, that’s right. I agree that a perfect calculation of your counterfactual impact would do the right thing in this scenario, and probably all scenarios. This is an empirical claim that the actual impact calculations that meta-orgs do are of the form that I wrote in my previous comment.
For example, consider the impact calculations that GWWC and other meta orgs have. If those impact calculations (with their current methodologies) showed a ratio of 1.1:1, that seems nominally worthwhile (you still have the multiplicative impact), but I would expect that it would be better to give directly to charities to avoid effects like the ones Joey talked about in his post.
A true full counterfactual impact calculation would consider the world in which GWWC just sends the money straight to charities and convinces other meta orgs to do the same, at which point they see that more money gets donated to charities in total, and so they all close operations and send money straight to charities. I’m arguing that this doesn’t happen in practice. (I think Joey and Peter are arguing the same thing.)