Thanks Jessica, this is helpful, and I really appreciate the speed at which you replied.
A couple of things that might be quick to answer and also helpful:
is there an expected value of someone working in an EA career that CEA uses? The rationale above suggests something like ‘we want to spend as much as top tier employers’ but presumably this relates to an expected value of attracting top talent that would otherwise work at those firms?
I agree that it’s not feasible to produce, let alone publish, a BOTEC on every payout. However, is there a bar that you’re aiming to exceed for the manager of a group to agree to a spending request? Or a threshold where you’d want more consideration about granting funding? I’m sure there are examples of things you wouldn’t fund, or would see as very expensive and would have some rule-of-thumb for agreeing to (off-site residential retreats might be one). Or is it more ‘this seems within the range of things that might help, and we haven’t spent >$1m on this school yet?’
is there any counterfactual discounting? Obviously a lot of very talented people work in EA and/or have left jobs at the employers you mention to work in EA. So what’s the thinking on how this spending will improve the talent in EA?
Some non-CEA people have made estimates that we sometimes refer to. I’m not sure I have permission to share them, but they suggest significant value. Based in part on these figures, I think that the value of a counterfactual high-performing EA is in the tens of millions of dollars.
I think we should also expect higher willingness to pay than private firms because of the general money/people balance in the community, and because we care about their whole career (whereas BCG will in expectation only get about 4 years of their career (number made up)).
I’ll let Jessica answer with more specifics if she wants to, but we’re currently spending much less than $1m/school.
Yes, it’s obviously important that figures are counterfactually discounted. But groups seem have historically been counterfactually important to people (see OP’s survey), and we think it’s likely that they will be in the future too. Given the high value of additional top people, I think spending like this still looks pretty good.
Fwiw, I personally would be excited about CEA spending much more on this at their current level of certainty if there were ways to mitigate optics, community health, and tail risk issues.
I see from Max below, though, that Open Phil is assuming a lot of this spending, so sorry for throwing a grenade at CEA if you’re not actually going to be behind a really ‘move the needle’ amount of campus spending.
Thanks Jessica, this is helpful, and I really appreciate the speed at which you replied.
A couple of things that might be quick to answer and also helpful:
is there an expected value of someone working in an EA career that CEA uses? The rationale above suggests something like ‘we want to spend as much as top tier employers’ but presumably this relates to an expected value of attracting top talent that would otherwise work at those firms?
I agree that it’s not feasible to produce, let alone publish, a BOTEC on every payout. However, is there a bar that you’re aiming to exceed for the manager of a group to agree to a spending request? Or a threshold where you’d want more consideration about granting funding? I’m sure there are examples of things you wouldn’t fund, or would see as very expensive and would have some rule-of-thumb for agreeing to (off-site residential retreats might be one). Or is it more ‘this seems within the range of things that might help, and we haven’t spent >$1m on this school yet?’
is there any counterfactual discounting? Obviously a lot of very talented people work in EA and/or have left jobs at the employers you mention to work in EA. So what’s the thinking on how this spending will improve the talent in EA?
Some non-CEA people have made estimates that we sometimes refer to. I’m not sure I have permission to share them, but they suggest significant value. Based in part on these figures, I think that the value of a counterfactual high-performing EA is in the tens of millions of dollars.
I think we should also expect higher willingness to pay than private firms because of the general money/people balance in the community, and because we care about their whole career (whereas BCG will in expectation only get about 4 years of their career (number made up)).
I’ll let Jessica answer with more specifics if she wants to, but we’re currently spending much less than $1m/school.
Yes, it’s obviously important that figures are counterfactually discounted. But groups seem have historically been counterfactually important to people (see OP’s survey), and we think it’s likely that they will be in the future too. Given the high value of additional top people, I think spending like this still looks pretty good.
Overall, CEA is planning to spend ~$1.5mil on uni group support in 2022 across ~75 campuses, which is a lot less than $1mil/campus. :)
Fwiw, I personally would be excited about CEA spending much more on this at their current level of certainty if there were ways to mitigate optics, community health, and tail risk issues.
Indeed :-) I had understood from this post (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FjDpyJNnzK8teSu4J/) that this was the destination, though, so the current rate of spending would be less relevant than having good heuristics before we get to that scale.
I see from Max below, though, that Open Phil is assuming a lot of this spending, so sorry for throwing a grenade at CEA if you’re not actually going to be behind a really ‘move the needle’ amount of campus spending.