I imagine the actual mean EA is likely more valuable than that given a long right tail of impact.
This still sounds like a strong understatement to me – it seems that some people will have vastly more impact. Quick example that gestures in this direction: assuming that there are 5000 EAs, Sam Bankman-Fried is donating $20 billion, and all other 1999 4999 EAs have no impact whatsoever, the mean impact of EAs is $4 million, not $126k. That’s a factor of 30x, so a framing like “likely vastly more valuable” would seem more appropriate to me.
One reason to be lower than this per recruited EA is that you might think that the people who need to be recruited are systematically less valuable on average than the people who don’t need to be. Possibly not a huge adjustment in any case, but worth considering.
Personally I think going for something like 50k doesn’t make sense, as I expect that the 5k (or even 500) most engaged people will have a much higher impact than the others.
Also, my guess of how CEA/FTX are thinking about this is actually that they assume an even smaller number (perhaps 2k or so?) because they’re aiming for highly engaged people, and don’t pay as much attention to how many less engaged people they’re causing.
Peter was using a bar of “actually become EA in some meaningful way (e.g., take GWWC pledge or equivalent)”. GWWC is 8k on its own, though there’s probably been substantial attrition.
But yes, because we expect impact to be power-lawish if you order all plausible EAs by impact there will probably not be any especially compelling places to draw a line.
This still sounds like a strong understatement to me – it seems that some people will have vastly more impact. Quick example that gestures in this direction: assuming that there are 5000 EAs, Sam Bankman-Fried is donating $20 billion, and all other
19994999 EAs have no impact whatsoever, the mean impact of EAs is $4 million, not $126k. That’s a factor of 30x, so a framing like “likely vastly more valuable” would seem more appropriate to me.One reason to be lower than this per recruited EA is that you might think that the people who need to be recruited are systematically less valuable on average than the people who don’t need to be. Possibly not a huge adjustment in any case, but worth considering.
Yeah I fully agree with this; that’s partly why I wrote “gestures”. Probably should have flagged it more explicitly from the beginning.
Should be 4999
I know this isn’t your main point, but that’s ~1/10 what I would have guessed. 5k is only 3x the people who attended EAG London this year.
Personally I think going for something like 50k doesn’t make sense, as I expect that the 5k (or even 500) most engaged people will have a much higher impact than the others.
Also, my guess of how CEA/FTX are thinking about this is actually that they assume an even smaller number (perhaps 2k or so?) because they’re aiming for highly engaged people, and don’t pay as much attention to how many less engaged people they’re causing.
Peter was using a bar of “actually become EA in some meaningful way (e.g., take GWWC pledge or equivalent)”. GWWC is 8k on its own, though there’s probably been substantial attrition.
But yes, because we expect impact to be power-lawish if you order all plausible EAs by impact there will probably not be any especially compelling places to draw a line.