Good point. I have not mentioned what is meant by impact. Some thoughts:
It depends on one’s moral views, but I guess leaving it undefined was a fine way of accounting for moral uncertainty. People presumably gave their estimates based on their moral views.
In practice, each organisation has its own heuristics for impact. For Against Malaria Foundation, it may be the number of distributed bednets. For a research organisation, it may include the quantity and quality of publications. More generally, success in the objectives and key results of the organisation would be an indication of producing impact.
In the email you sent you asked for “(I_OM / C_OM) / (I_A / C_A)
I would say I did not exactly ask people to use that formula. I asked:
For both [organisation] and the effective altruism community, I would be happy to know your best guesses for the ratio between the expected marginal cost-effectiveness of:
Operations management positions.
All positions.
Then, I gave that formula as as example:
One example way of estimating the ratio is from (I_OM / C_OM) / (I_A / C_A)
Only 3 people explicitly used this formula (in agreement with the tables of this section).
It would’ve helped a lot to see this information in the post itself to follow reasoning transparency.
Thanks for the feedback. I thought linking to it was fine, as the formula was just a suggestion intended to illustrate what I meant by ratio between the expected marginal cost-effectiveness of operations management and all positions.
Hi Vasco,
Thanks so much for all the effort put into attempting to do this calculation. I really appreciate it!
I have one main question (+ a meta comment) around the calculation of the cost-effectiveness of OM:
In the email you sent you asked for “(I_OM / C_OM) / (I_A / C_A), where:
I_OM is the expected loss of impact due to one randomly selected person in operations management working 1 hour less.
C_OM is the expected hourly rate of one randomly selected person in operations management.
I_A is the expected loss of impact due to one randomly selected person working 1 hour less.
C_A is the expected hourly rate of one randomly selected person.”
What impact metric is meant by I? I read through your post, but maybe I missed something...
It would’ve helped a lot to see this information in the post itself to follow reasoning transparency.
Hi Cristina,
Thanks for the kind words!
Good point. I have not mentioned what is meant by impact. Some thoughts:
It depends on one’s moral views, but I guess leaving it undefined was a fine way of accounting for moral uncertainty. People presumably gave their estimates based on their moral views.
In practice, each organisation has its own heuristics for impact. For Against Malaria Foundation, it may be the number of distributed bednets. For a research organisation, it may include the quantity and quality of publications. More generally, success in the objectives and key results of the organisation would be an indication of producing impact.
I would say I did not exactly ask people to use that formula. I asked:
Then, I gave that formula as as example:
Only 3 people explicitly used this formula (in agreement with the tables of this section).
Thanks for the feedback. I thought linking to it was fine, as the formula was just a suggestion intended to illustrate what I meant by ratio between the expected marginal cost-effectiveness of operations management and all positions.