I agree that we should treat credit assignment differently, but when deciding what to fund, we should always be able to reduce the problem to “What maximizes?” or “What’s the best that can be done with my $X?”. I think the relevant question here is something like “If I donate $X to SWP, what happens?” And then you divide the (expected) difference in the counterfactuals by $X to get your cost-effectiveness.
I have three possibilities in mind. 1 is the scenario I expected to actually be the case here. 1 is mutually exclusive with 2 and 3, but 2 and 3 can happen together or either alone.
If the overhead costs are fixed and already fully covered either way, then your donations just go towards non-overhead costs, and the marginal cost-effectiveness should not reflect overhead. This is the scenario I had in mind.
If your donations influence how much overhead is necessary, e.g. because they need to hire more, and some of your donations go to that, then you need to include the extra overhead in the costs and make sure your impact reflects that.
If your donations influence how much overhead costs are covered by the funders covering the overhead, then you need to worry about their counterfactuals, i.e. what they would have otherwise done with their money. That goes into the impact of your donations.
1 could still involve indirect effects to worry about, i.e. you might increase the probability that funders cover overhead in the future like this, for SWP or others, which actually means we get something like 3.
I agree that we should treat credit assignment differently, but when deciding what to fund, we should always be able to reduce the problem to “What maximizes?” or “What’s the best that can be done with my $X?”. I think the relevant question here is something like “If I donate $X to SWP, what happens?” And then you divide the (expected) difference in the counterfactuals by $X to get your cost-effectiveness.
I have three possibilities in mind. 1 is the scenario I expected to actually be the case here. 1 is mutually exclusive with 2 and 3, but 2 and 3 can happen together or either alone.
If the overhead costs are fixed and already fully covered either way, then your donations just go towards non-overhead costs, and the marginal cost-effectiveness should not reflect overhead. This is the scenario I had in mind.
If your donations influence how much overhead is necessary, e.g. because they need to hire more, and some of your donations go to that, then you need to include the extra overhead in the costs and make sure your impact reflects that.
If your donations influence how much overhead costs are covered by the funders covering the overhead, then you need to worry about their counterfactuals, i.e. what they would have otherwise done with their money. That goes into the impact of your donations.
1 could still involve indirect effects to worry about, i.e. you might increase the probability that funders cover overhead in the future like this, for SWP or others, which actually means we get something like 3.