Michael, a large part of my argument rests on the premise that the EA community has grown to the point where it is capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time. You seem to be viewing this through an individual scarcity lens where we only have one choice to make about which action we’re going to take, and it has to be the most effective one. I disagree. I see EA as a diverse, multifaceted movement with many assets that can be deployed toward the collective good. This piece is about how those resources can be collectively deployed most effectively, which is a different question from “how can I do the most good.”
Imagine chewing gum is an unbelievably effective cause: it’s life-saving impact is many orders of magnitude higher than walking. If we want to maximise chewing gum to the fullest we cannot have any distractions, not even potential or little ones. Walking has opportunity costs and prevents us from extremely super effective gum chewing.
This piece is about how those resources can be collectively deployed most effectively, which is a different question from “how can I do the most good.”
Michael’s post still applies. Collective resources are just a sum of many individuals and everyone/every group contemplating their marginal impact ideally includes other EAs’ work in their considerations. The opportunity cost bit applies both to individuals and groups (or the entire movement)
Any unit EA resource spent by x people has opportunity costs.
Can you walk me through your reasoning of why the marginal value of encouraging the practice of effective altruism within domains is not likely to be greater than the marginal opportunity cost of doing so?
Because we could work on more effective causes with these resources.
See Michael’s
The difference probably matters even more in some causes—I would posit that SCI probably does 10,000 to a million times more good than the best arts charity. That means if you can convince one person to give to SCI, that’s as good as convincing 10,000 arts enthusiasts to make donations more effectively within the arts. One of these sounds a lot easier than the other.
Spreading EA thinking within domains is an idea for an intervention in the EA outreach cause. I don’t think the good per unit time invested (=impact) can compete with already existing EA interventions
So, are you arguing that investing in EA outreach in domain-specific ways can’t compete or that investing in EA outreach at all can’t compete? Your last paragraph sounds like you’re saying the latter, but I find that to be a rather nonsensical position if you think that correctly targeted donations are so highly leveraged.
If the claim is that domain-specific EA outreach is less effective per unit invested than cause neutral EA outreach, keep in mind that I argue domain-specific EA outreach will grow the movement faster/more than the alternative, which in turn creates more resources that can be deployed toward further outreach (or other helpful functions, like operations or research). Depending on your assumptions about the ratio between the total ceiling of cause-neutral people and domain-specific people out there, that growth factor could be extremely significant to EA’s total impact on the world.
The former; outreach is great. It would probably be better if you argued in the thread above to collect your thoughts in one place, since I share Ben Todd’s opinion and he put it much better than I could.
I enjoyed reading your well thought out post by the way!
Michael, a large part of my argument rests on the premise that the EA community has grown to the point where it is capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time. You seem to be viewing this through an individual scarcity lens where we only have one choice to make about which action we’re going to take, and it has to be the most effective one. I disagree. I see EA as a diverse, multifaceted movement with many assets that can be deployed toward the collective good. This piece is about how those resources can be collectively deployed most effectively, which is a different question from “how can I do the most good.”
Imagine chewing gum is an unbelievably effective cause: it’s life-saving impact is many orders of magnitude higher than walking. If we want to maximise chewing gum to the fullest we cannot have any distractions, not even potential or little ones. Walking has opportunity costs and prevents us from extremely super effective gum chewing.
Michael’s post still applies. Collective resources are just a sum of many individuals and everyone/every group contemplating their marginal impact ideally includes other EAs’ work in their considerations. The opportunity cost bit applies both to individuals and groups (or the entire movement)
Any unit EA resource spent by x people has opportunity costs.
Can you walk me through your reasoning of why the marginal value of encouraging the practice of effective altruism within domains is not likely to be greater than the marginal opportunity cost of doing so?
Because we could work on more effective causes with these resources. See Michael’s
Spreading EA thinking within domains is an idea for an intervention in the EA outreach cause. I don’t think the good per unit time invested (=impact) can compete with already existing EA interventions
So, are you arguing that investing in EA outreach in domain-specific ways can’t compete or that investing in EA outreach at all can’t compete? Your last paragraph sounds like you’re saying the latter, but I find that to be a rather nonsensical position if you think that correctly targeted donations are so highly leveraged.
If the claim is that domain-specific EA outreach is less effective per unit invested than cause neutral EA outreach, keep in mind that I argue domain-specific EA outreach will grow the movement faster/more than the alternative, which in turn creates more resources that can be deployed toward further outreach (or other helpful functions, like operations or research). Depending on your assumptions about the ratio between the total ceiling of cause-neutral people and domain-specific people out there, that growth factor could be extremely significant to EA’s total impact on the world.
The former; outreach is great. It would probably be better if you argued in the thread above to collect your thoughts in one place, since I share Ben Todd’s opinion and he put it much better than I could. I enjoyed reading your well thought out post by the way!