I mostly agree; the uncertain flow-through effects of giving socks to one’s colleagues totally overwhelm the direct impact and are probably at least 1/1000 as big as the effects of being a charity entrepreneur (when you take the expected value according to our best knowledge right now). If Ana is trying to do good by donating socks, instead of saying she’s doing 1⁄20,000,000th the good she could be, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that she has an incorrect theory of change and is doing good (or harm) by accident.
I think the direct impacts of the best interventions are larger than their expected (according to our current knowledge) net flow-through effects in a trivial sense, since if nothing else we can analyze flow-through effects of arbitrary interventions and come up with better interventions that optimize for this until we find the best ones.
I mostly agree; the uncertain flow-through effects of giving socks to one’s colleagues totally overwhelm the direct impact and are probably at least 1/1000 as big as the effects of being a charity entrepreneur (when you take the expected value according to our best knowledge right now). If Ana is trying to do good by donating socks, instead of saying she’s doing 1⁄20,000,000th the good she could be, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that she has an incorrect theory of change and is doing good (or harm) by accident.
I think the direct impacts of the best interventions are larger than their expected (according to our current knowledge) net flow-through effects in a trivial sense, since if nothing else we can analyze flow-through effects of arbitrary interventions and come up with better interventions that optimize for this until we find the best ones.