Great post! While I agree with your main claims, I believe the numbers for the multipliers (especially in aggregate and for ex ante impact evaluations) are nowhere near as extreme in reality as your article suggests for the reasons that Brian Tomasik elaborates on in these two articles:
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 agree—and if the multiplier numbers are lower, then some claims are don’t hold, e.g.:
To get more than 50% of her maximum possible impact, Ana must hit every single multiplier.
This doesn’t hold if the set of multipliers includes 1.5x, for example.
Instead we might want to talk about the importance of hitting as many big multipliers as possible. And being willing to spend more effort on these over the smaller (e.g. 1.1x) ones.
(But want to add that I think the post in general is great! Thanks for writing this up!)
Well, you know what the stereotype is about women in Silicon Valley high tech companies & their sock needs… (Incidentally, when I wrote a sock-themed essay, which was really not about socks, I was surprised how many strong opinions on sock brands people had, and how expensive socks could be.)
If you don’t like the example ‘buy socks’, perhaps one can replace it with real-world examples like spending all one’s free time knitting sweaters for penguins. (With the rise of Ravelry and other things, knitting is more popular than it has been in a long time.)
Great post! While I agree with your main claims, I believe the numbers for the multipliers (especially in aggregate and for ex ante impact evaluations) are nowhere near as extreme in reality as your article suggests for the reasons that Brian Tomasik elaborates on in these two articles:
(i) Charity Cost-Effectiveness in an Uncertain World
(ii) Why Charities Usually Don’t Differ Astronomically in Expected Cost-Effectiveness
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 agree—and if the multiplier numbers are lower, then some claims are don’t hold, e.g.:
This doesn’t hold if the set of multipliers includes 1.5x, for example.
Instead we might want to talk about the importance of hitting as many big multipliers as possible. And being willing to spend more effort on these over the smaller (e.g. 1.1x) ones.
(But want to add that I think the post in general is great! Thanks for writing this up!)
Well, you know what the stereotype is about women in Silicon Valley high tech companies & their sock needs… (Incidentally, when I wrote a sock-themed essay, which was really not about socks, I was surprised how many strong opinions on sock brands people had, and how expensive socks could be.)
If you don’t like the example ‘buy socks’, perhaps one can replace it with real-world examples like spending all one’s free time knitting sweaters for penguins. (With the rise of Ravelry and other things, knitting is more popular than it has been in a long time.)