Thanks for the considered response David, upvoted. I’ll preface by saying that I appreciate the effort you’re putting into this.
When I first read your post, I anchored hard to ”… so that I can very honestly, and with a lot of authority, tell a potential donor...” which made me assume you’ve spoken to potential donors, which I resonated with. I’ve only spoken to potential small local donors in a very limited personal capacity, and a recurring concern they raise is that they simply don’t want to be misled by claims of effectiveness (forget cost-effectiveness). I recall speaking to someone who felt disquieted by not just the number but also the kind of uncertainty-driven adjustments I listed above for instance, and also appreciative of me pointing them out. I recall speaking to another person who was disquieted by the nature of helping in statistical expectation, when what they wanted was certainty; they appreciated me pointing this out as well (and were unpersuaded by the arguments for expectation-oriented giving).
This disquiet is of course a personal matter, very case-by-case; instead of guessing you should just ask potential donors. In this context your comment makes me wonder if you’ve spoken to any, and if so what did they think of your approach? To be more direct: when you say things like “it seems plausible to me that someone could have a 95% confidence”, is that from talking to them or just your own guesses for now?
I’ve only spoken to a few donors, mostly friends and family. They seemed to especially like the idea of donating to charities that are local to their communities, which most highly cost-effective charities don’t, because they are mostly in low income places, not the USA. They were also concerned with what portion of the donated money would be spent on the charity’s own overhead or administration. And they especially didn’t want to receive spam mail or email from charities as a result of donating.
I suppose my assumption is that I should start with an argument I think would work on myself, if I hadn’t studied global health as much as I have, and then try to figure out what part of that people are resistant to. If I hadn’t studied global health, and wanted to be able to donate effectively without having to study it, I would have been looking for that upper limit with a likelihood of somewhere around 95% that the cost would be below it, even if the upper limit needed to be pretty high in order to reach that level of certainty. So now I’m trying to figure out such an upper limit myself.
I again want to say that I resonate a lot with what you’re trying to do, since I’ve tried (and mostly failed) to do something similar myself before.
I worry a bit that you’re prematurely optimising approach-wise when you conclude the thing to focus on is figuring out the cost-effectiveness upper limit at which you can tell people honestly and confidently that their donation is doing that much good, instead of asking donors how they think about giving (which you did). For instance, Sawyer’s comment reiterates the sentiment I mentioned earlier that
Most potential donors are not really risk neutral, and would rather spend $5,001 to definitely save one life than $5,000 to have a 10% chance of saving 10 lives. Risk neutrality is a totally defensible position, but so is non-neutrality. It’s good to have the option of paying a “premium” for a higher confidence (but lower risk-neutral EV).
Orthogonally, I think most people are willing to pay more for a more legible/direct theory of impact.
“I give $2800, this kid has lifesaving heart surgery” is certainly more legible and direct than a GiveWell-type charity. In the former case, the donor doesn’t have to trust GiveWell’s methodologies, data gathering abilities, and freedom from bias.
and these aren’t necessarily obvious in advance, so if you start from a (simplistic) model of giving advisory effectiveness as being [number of prospective donors in your circle] x [fraction of donors who find argument X persuasive] x [$ per donor] x [expected good per $], then starting with an argument that works on yourself (and on me too — I don’t think we’re that representative of the donor pool) doesn’t let you get empirical input on the 2nd term, while asking donors does.
Thanks for the considered response David, upvoted. I’ll preface by saying that I appreciate the effort you’re putting into this.
When I first read your post, I anchored hard to ”… so that I can very honestly, and with a lot of authority, tell a potential donor...” which made me assume you’ve spoken to potential donors, which I resonated with. I’ve only spoken to potential small local donors in a very limited personal capacity, and a recurring concern they raise is that they simply don’t want to be misled by claims of effectiveness (forget cost-effectiveness). I recall speaking to someone who felt disquieted by not just the number but also the kind of uncertainty-driven adjustments I listed above for instance, and also appreciative of me pointing them out. I recall speaking to another person who was disquieted by the nature of helping in statistical expectation, when what they wanted was certainty; they appreciated me pointing this out as well (and were unpersuaded by the arguments for expectation-oriented giving).
This disquiet is of course a personal matter, very case-by-case; instead of guessing you should just ask potential donors. In this context your comment makes me wonder if you’ve spoken to any, and if so what did they think of your approach? To be more direct: when you say things like “it seems plausible to me that someone could have a 95% confidence”, is that from talking to them or just your own guesses for now?
I’ve only spoken to a few donors, mostly friends and family. They seemed to especially like the idea of donating to charities that are local to their communities, which most highly cost-effective charities don’t, because they are mostly in low income places, not the USA. They were also concerned with what portion of the donated money would be spent on the charity’s own overhead or administration. And they especially didn’t want to receive spam mail or email from charities as a result of donating.
I suppose my assumption is that I should start with an argument I think would work on myself, if I hadn’t studied global health as much as I have, and then try to figure out what part of that people are resistant to. If I hadn’t studied global health, and wanted to be able to donate effectively without having to study it, I would have been looking for that upper limit with a likelihood of somewhere around 95% that the cost would be below it, even if the upper limit needed to be pretty high in order to reach that level of certainty. So now I’m trying to figure out such an upper limit myself.
I again want to say that I resonate a lot with what you’re trying to do, since I’ve tried (and mostly failed) to do something similar myself before.
I worry a bit that you’re prematurely optimising approach-wise when you conclude the thing to focus on is figuring out the cost-effectiveness upper limit at which you can tell people honestly and confidently that their donation is doing that much good, instead of asking donors how they think about giving (which you did). For instance, Sawyer’s comment reiterates the sentiment I mentioned earlier that
and Jason’s comment seems relevant as well:
and these aren’t necessarily obvious in advance, so if you start from a (simplistic) model of giving advisory effectiveness as being [number of prospective donors in your circle] x [fraction of donors who find argument X persuasive] x [$ per donor] x [expected good per $], then starting with an argument that works on yourself (and on me too — I don’t think we’re that representative of the donor pool) doesn’t let you get empirical input on the 2nd term, while asking donors does.