You make a good point that going up another meta level adds another layer at which you can fail to have a positive impact. This is a really important problem with meta that I hadn’t thought of.
I don’t think we should be too concerned about the “Club Club” problem. Right now, meta-orgs like Charity Science are good donations targets precisely because they efficiently direct lots of donations to good object-level charities. If this stops being the case, Charity Science will no longer have the same appeal, and they can’t make the same clear-cut arguments for their effectiveness.
That’s true, but most Charity Science fundraising experiments are unusual in that their success or failure is relatively easy to determine (by design rather than by accident). We can generally look at direct, immediate, counterfactually-adjusted money moved and check them against the prespecified criteria for success or failure. That’s (unavoidably) harder to do for many other meta activities.
So then my argument only applies to people who prefer to donate to meta-charities that have demonstrable evidence that they actually direct donations to effective object-level causes. This is what I do but I may have been overestimating how many people operate this way.
Sounds like you’re mainly interested in projects only one meta-level above. But as the number of projects with 2+ meta-levels increases, this may get harder.
You make a good point that going up another meta level adds another layer at which you can fail to have a positive impact. This is a really important problem with meta that I hadn’t thought of.
I don’t think we should be too concerned about the “Club Club” problem. Right now, meta-orgs like Charity Science are good donations targets precisely because they efficiently direct lots of donations to good object-level charities. If this stops being the case, Charity Science will no longer have the same appeal, and they can’t make the same clear-cut arguments for their effectiveness.
That’s true, but most Charity Science fundraising experiments are unusual in that their success or failure is relatively easy to determine (by design rather than by accident). We can generally look at direct, immediate, counterfactually-adjusted money moved and check them against the prespecified criteria for success or failure. That’s (unavoidably) harder to do for many other meta activities.
So then my argument only applies to people who prefer to donate to meta-charities that have demonstrable evidence that they actually direct donations to effective object-level causes. This is what I do but I may have been overestimating how many people operate this way.
Sounds like you’re mainly interested in projects only one meta-level above. But as the number of projects with 2+ meta-levels increases, this may get harder.