In practice, I think there’s almost never an option to save 1 billion people from poverty with certainty. When I said that there was, that was a hack I had to put in there to make the math work out so that the short-termist would come to a different conclusion from the long-termist.
GiveDirectly could get pretty high probabilities (or close for a smaller number of people at lower cost), although it’s not the favoured intervention of those focused on global health and poverty.
Another notable remaining difference is that extinction is all or nothing, so your chance (and the whole community’s chance) of doing any good at all is much lower, although its impact would be much higher when you do make a difference.
When people allocate money to causes other than existential risk, I think it’s more often as a sort of moral parliament maneuver, rather than because they calculated it out and the other cause is better in a way that would change if we considered the long-term future.
I would guess it’s usually based on requiring higher standards of evidence to support an intervention (and greater skepticism without), so they actually think GiveWell interventions are more cost-effective on the margin.
GiveDirectly could get pretty high probabilities (or close for a smaller number of people at lower cost), although it’s not the favoured intervention of those focused on global health and poverty.
Another notable remaining difference is that extinction is all or nothing, so your chance (and the whole community’s chance) of doing any good at all is much lower, although its impact would be much higher when you do make a difference.
I would guess it’s usually based on requiring higher standards of evidence to support an intervention (and greater skepticism without), so they actually think GiveWell interventions are more cost-effective on the margin.