Agreement karma indicates agreement, separate from overall quality.
It sounds like you want to be the one who creates a tipping point. E.g. in your election analogy, if 51⁄100 people voted for your preferred candidate, you’d want to be the 51st person who made the difference between them winning and losing. Or if it cost $5000 to save a life (every time, not on average), you’d want to be sure you donated the 5000th dollar.
That’s totally understandable (if I’m interpreting you correctly), but I’m not sure it’s a helpful way of thinking about things in this case.
Yes, marginal cost effectiveness is important— that’s why we think about neglectedness. But once you’ve selected a cost effective charity, the usefulness of the concept breaks down a bit. (At least in IMO).
Sure, perhaps in some sense the 5000th dollar is more valuable than the other 4999, because it ticked the counter over. But it wouldn’t have been the 5000th dollar if the first dollar hadn’t been donated. In that sense, each dollar is equally valuable— they all have an equal chance of creating that tipping point.
That’s why we think probabilistically. It’s impossible to know ahead of time which dollar will make the marginal difference. So we look for the charities which give the best odds. That’s part of what GiveWell does— their recommended charities are ones they think can make the best use of marginal funding.
At that point, every dollar counts, whether it’s the 1st or the 5000th. This is a team effort, and your contributions aren’t less valuable just because someone else happened to give the final dollar 💙
3 votes
Overall karma indicates overall quality.
Total points: 1
Agreement karma indicates agreement, separate from overall quality.
It sounds like you want to be the one who creates a tipping point. E.g. in your election analogy, if 51⁄100 people voted for your preferred candidate, you’d want to be the 51st person who made the difference between them winning and losing. Or if it cost $5000 to save a life (every time, not on average), you’d want to be sure you donated the 5000th dollar.
That’s totally understandable (if I’m interpreting you correctly), but I’m not sure it’s a helpful way of thinking about things in this case.
Yes, marginal cost effectiveness is important— that’s why we think about neglectedness. But once you’ve selected a cost effective charity, the usefulness of the concept breaks down a bit. (At least in IMO).
Sure, perhaps in some sense the 5000th dollar is more valuable than the other 4999, because it ticked the counter over. But it wouldn’t have been the 5000th dollar if the first dollar hadn’t been donated. In that sense, each dollar is equally valuable— they all have an equal chance of creating that tipping point.
That’s why we think probabilistically. It’s impossible to know ahead of time which dollar will make the marginal difference. So we look for the charities which give the best odds. That’s part of what GiveWell does— their recommended charities are ones they think can make the best use of marginal funding.
At that point, every dollar counts, whether it’s the 1st or the 5000th. This is a team effort, and your contributions aren’t less valuable just because someone else happened to give the final dollar 💙