I think one thing that people, both in and outside of EA orgs, find confusing is that we don’t have a sense of how high the standards of marginal cost-effectiveness ought to be before it’s worth scaling at all. Related concepts include “Open Phil’s last dollar” and “quality standards/”
In global health I think there’s a clear minimal benchmark (something like “$s given to GiveDirectly at >10B/year scales”), but it’s not clear I think whether people should bother creating scalable charities that are slightly better in expectation (say 2x) than GiveDirectly or if they ought to have a plausible case to be competing with marginal Malaria Consortium or AMF or deworming donations (which I think is estimated at current disease burdens, moral value of life vs economic benefits, etc, to be ~5-25x(?) the impact of GiveDirectly).
In longtermism I think the situation is murkier. There’s no minimal baseline at all (except maybe GiveDirectly again, which is now more reliant on moral beliefs rather than empirical beliefs about the world), so I think people are just quite confused in general whether what’s scaling looks more like “90th percentile climate change intervention” vs “has a plausible shot of being the most important AI alignment intervention.”
In animal welfare it’s somewhere in between. I think corporate campaigns a) looks like a promising marginal use of money and b)our uncertainty about its impact ranges more like 2 orders of magnitude (rather than ~1 for global health and ~infinite for longtermism). But comparing scalable interventions to existing corporate campaigns is premised on there not being lots of $s that’d flood the animal welfare space in the future, and I think this is a quite uncertain proposition in practice.
Meta is at least as confused as the object-level charities because you’re multiplying the uncertainty of doing the meta work to the uncertainty of how it feeds into the object-level work, so it should be more confused, not less.
Personally, my own best guess is that I think when people are confused about what quality standards to aim at, they default to either a) sputtering around or b) doing the highest quality things possible instead of consciously and carefully think about what things can scale while maintaining (or accepting slightly worse) current quality, which means we currently implicitly overestimate the value of the last EA dollar.
I’m inside-view pretty convinced last-dollar uncertainty is a really big deal in practice, yet many grantmakers seem to disagree (see eg comments here), I’m not sure where the intuition differences lie.
I agree this is a big issue, and my impression is many grantmakers agree.
In longtermism, I think the relevant benchmark is indeed something like OP’s last dollar in the longtermism worldview bucket. Ideally, you’d also include the investment returns you’ll earn between now and when that’s spent. This is extremely uncertain.
Another benchmark would be something like offsetting CO2, which is most likely positive for existential risk and could be done at a huge scale. Personally, I hope we can find things that are a lot better than this, so I don’t think it’s the most relevant benchmark—more of a lower bound.
In some ways, meta seems more straightforward—the benchmark should be can you produce more than 1 unit of resources (NPV) per unit that you use?
I agree this is a big issue, and my impression is many grantmakers agree.
Hmm I’d love to see some survey results or a more representative sample. I often have trouble telling whether my opinions are contrarian or boringly mainstream!
Another benchmark would be something like offsetting CO2, which is most likely positive for existential risk and could be done at a huge scale. Personally, I hope we can find things that are a lot better than this, so I don’t think it’s the most relevant benchmark—more of a lower bound.
I wonder if this is better or worse than buying up fractions of AI companies?
In some ways, meta seems more straightforward—the benchmark should be can you produce more than 1 unit of resources (NPV) per unit that you use?
I think I agree, but I’m not confident about this, because this feels maybe too high-level? “1 unit” seems much more heterogeneous and less fungible when the resources we’re thinking of is “people” or (worse) “conceptual breakthroughs” (as might be the case for cause prio work), and there are lots of ways that things are in practice pretty hard to compare, including but not limited to sign flips.
I should have probably have just said that OP seem very interested in the last dollar problem (and that’s ~60% of grantmaking capacity).
Agree with your comments on meta.
With cause pri research, I’d be trying to think about how much more effectively it lets us spend the portfolio e.g. a 1% improvement to $420 million per year is worth about $4.2m per year.
Epistemic status: Moderate opinion, held weakly.
I think one thing that people, both in and outside of EA orgs, find confusing is that we don’t have a sense of how high the standards of marginal cost-effectiveness ought to be before it’s worth scaling at all. Related concepts include “Open Phil’s last dollar” and “quality standards/”
In global health I think there’s a clear minimal benchmark (something like “$s given to GiveDirectly at >10B/year scales”), but it’s not clear I think whether people should bother creating scalable charities that are slightly better in expectation (say 2x) than GiveDirectly or if they ought to have a plausible case to be competing with marginal Malaria Consortium or AMF or deworming donations (which I think is estimated at current disease burdens, moral value of life vs economic benefits, etc, to be ~5-25x(?) the impact of GiveDirectly).
In longtermism I think the situation is murkier. There’s no minimal baseline at all (except maybe GiveDirectly again, which is now more reliant on moral beliefs rather than empirical beliefs about the world), so I think people are just quite confused in general whether what’s scaling looks more like “90th percentile climate change intervention” vs “has a plausible shot of being the most important AI alignment intervention.”
In animal welfare it’s somewhere in between. I think corporate campaigns a) looks like a promising marginal use of money and b)our uncertainty about its impact ranges more like 2 orders of magnitude (rather than ~1 for global health and ~infinite for longtermism). But comparing scalable interventions to existing corporate campaigns is premised on there not being lots of $s that’d flood the animal welfare space in the future, and I think this is a quite uncertain proposition in practice.
Meta is at least as confused as the object-level charities because you’re multiplying the uncertainty of doing the meta work to the uncertainty of how it feeds into the object-level work, so it should be more confused, not less.
Personally, my own best guess is that I think when people are confused about what quality standards to aim at, they default to either a) sputtering around or b) doing the highest quality things possible instead of consciously and carefully think about what things can scale while maintaining (or accepting slightly worse) current quality, which means we currently implicitly overestimate the value of the last EA dollar.
I’m inside-view pretty convinced last-dollar uncertainty is a really big deal in practice, yet many grantmakers seem to disagree (see eg comments here), I’m not sure where the intuition differences lie.
I agree this is a big issue, and my impression is many grantmakers agree.
In longtermism, I think the relevant benchmark is indeed something like OP’s last dollar in the longtermism worldview bucket. Ideally, you’d also include the investment returns you’ll earn between now and when that’s spent. This is extremely uncertain.
Another benchmark would be something like offsetting CO2, which is most likely positive for existential risk and could be done at a huge scale. Personally, I hope we can find things that are a lot better than this, so I don’t think it’s the most relevant benchmark—more of a lower bound.
In some ways, meta seems more straightforward—the benchmark should be can you produce more than 1 unit of resources (NPV) per unit that you use?
Hmm I’d love to see some survey results or a more representative sample. I often have trouble telling whether my opinions are contrarian or boringly mainstream!
I wonder if this is better or worse than buying up fractions of AI companies?
I think I agree, but I’m not confident about this, because this feels maybe too high-level? “1 unit” seems much more heterogeneous and less fungible when the resources we’re thinking of is “people” or (worse) “conceptual breakthroughs” (as might be the case for cause prio work), and there are lots of ways that things are in practice pretty hard to compare, including but not limited to sign flips.
I should have probably have just said that OP seem very interested in the last dollar problem (and that’s ~60% of grantmaking capacity).
Agree with your comments on meta.
With cause pri research, I’d be trying to think about how much more effectively it lets us spend the portfolio e.g. a 1% improvement to $420 million per year is worth about $4.2m per year.