A brief response to one point: if you are including second-order and third-order effects in your analysis, you should include them on both sides. Yes, donating to a local cause fosters connections in the community and ultimately state capacity and so on. But saving people from malaria does that stuff too, and intuitively when the first order effects are more dramatic, one expects the second order effects to be correspondingly more dramatic: you meet a new friend at your local animal shelter, and meanwhile the child that didnât die of malaria meets a whole lifeâs worth of people, their family has less grief and trauma, their community has greater certainty and security. Of course, itâs really hard to be sure of the whole story, but I donât see any reason to suppose that going one step deeper in the analysis will totally invert the conclusion of the first-level analysis.
I agree that the second- and third-order effects of e.g. donating to super-effective animal advocacy charities are, more likely than not, larger than those of e.g. volunteering at local animal shelters. (though that may depend on the exact charity youâre donating to?)
However, itâs likely that some other action has even larger second- and third-order effects than donating to top charitiesâafter all, most (though not all) of these charities are optimizing for first-order effects, rather than the second- and third-order ones.
Therefore, itâs not obviously justifiable to simply ignore second- and third-order effects in our analysis.
Great point! That is definitely the case that thereâs effects on all sides. The challenge of course is that the deeper you go into second and third order effects the more you sort of have a model of everything and then its really just what your prior worldview is.
Note that there emphatically is not, however, generally a direct relationship between your random software engineer donating on GiveWell and the ultimate recipient. Thatâs just the nature of the situation.
Also I would not say that this is 100% a given: âYes, donating to a local cause fosters connections in the community and ultimately state capacity and so on. â Local donations can also foster Tamney Hall style corruption which can be corrosive to a high capacity state apparatus.
That political machine did though probably create a lot of community and integrate a lot of immigrants into New York.
A brief response to one point: if you are including second-order and third-order effects in your analysis, you should include them on both sides. Yes, donating to a local cause fosters connections in the community and ultimately state capacity and so on. But saving people from malaria does that stuff too, and intuitively when the first order effects are more dramatic, one expects the second order effects to be correspondingly more dramatic: you meet a new friend at your local animal shelter, and meanwhile the child that didnât die of malaria meets a whole lifeâs worth of people, their family has less grief and trauma, their community has greater certainty and security. Of course, itâs really hard to be sure of the whole story, but I donât see any reason to suppose that going one step deeper in the analysis will totally invert the conclusion of the first-level analysis.
I agree that the second- and third-order effects of e.g. donating to super-effective animal advocacy charities are, more likely than not, larger than those of e.g. volunteering at local animal shelters. (though that may depend on the exact charity youâre donating to?)
However, itâs likely that some other action has even larger second- and third-order effects than donating to top charitiesâafter all, most (though not all) of these charities are optimizing for first-order effects, rather than the second- and third-order ones.
Therefore, itâs not obviously justifiable to simply ignore second- and third-order effects in our analysis.
Great point! That is definitely the case that thereâs effects on all sides. The challenge of course is that the deeper you go into second and third order effects the more you sort of have a model of everything and then its really just what your prior worldview is.
Note that there emphatically is not, however, generally a direct relationship between your random software engineer donating on GiveWell and the ultimate recipient. Thatâs just the nature of the situation.
Also I would not say that this is 100% a given: âYes, donating to a local cause fosters connections in the community and ultimately state capacity and so on. â Local donations can also foster Tamney Hall style corruption which can be corrosive to a high capacity state apparatus.
That political machine did though probably create a lot of community and integrate a lot of immigrants into New York.