Yes, there’s a huge, huge difference between the impact of GWWC existing as a place where people who wanted to pledge 10% of their income to help those living in global poverty could join others in publicly doing so, and the impact of its marginal funded activities now. GWWC existed as that place before The Centre for Effective Altruism was founded around it as an organisation with donors and a budget supporting paid employees. If minimal resources were spent on creating the basic infrastructure, and I don’t know if that’s so, but if so, then it had a mega high impact ratio. But it seems wrong to use that to justify keeping on spending more money on more employees doing more marginal projects until the impact from the original resource gets “used up.”
Ok this is all fair. I think, however, that a big fraction of the historical impact is due to on-going activity, of the kind that could continue, rather than being all due to the ‘set up’ generating the stream. And that would mean the historical ratio is a reasonable guide to the future.
This can be hard to see from the outside, but if you look at where new pledgers are coming from, it’s often new press coverage or student group activity. Many also only take the pledge after being nudged by someone in person, even if they had heard about GWWC some time before, so there’s an important role just talking to lots of people about the pledge. These kinds of activities can be scaled much further.
Moreover, GWWC tries to monitor the number of new pledges generated by new activities and will quit on anything that’s not generating enough. You can see some estimates by Rob of marginal returns above.
Overall, you’d still have to be very pessimistic. Suppose GWWC’s historical leverage ratio is 60. For the future leverage ratio to be less than one, you’d (roughly) need to think there was a 98% chance that marginal activities produced zero returns rather than historical rates of return.
Finally, I think it’s helpful to bear in mind how tiny GWWC is. Suppose taking the GWWC pledge is as ethically demanding as vegetarianism, then it could one day reach 1% of the developed world. Since GWWC only has 1000 members, it has only reached 0.01% of its addressable market. Given such limited penetration, I think it would be surprising if there were no further returns to be had. It’s not as if students at Cambridge (where ~100 people have taken the pledge recently) are radically different from those at other prestigious universities, so we should expect similar efforts to work elsewhere, so GWWC could already be 10x bigger even if just expanded among prestigious universities. If anything you might expect marginal costs per pledge to be dropping at this stage in GWWC’s growth as you benefit from economies of scale and critical mass effects (and there’s some evidence this is happening). Finally, given the chance that 99.99% of the value still lies in the future, it seems well worth spending a sizeable amount of resources now figuring out whether further growth is possible and how best to do it. In some ways, GWWC’s marginal leverage ratio is besides the point: it’s like looking at Google in its early days and deciding whether to invest or not based on whether it’s already profitable.
Yes, there’s a huge, huge difference between the impact of GWWC existing as a place where people who wanted to pledge 10% of their income to help those living in global poverty could join others in publicly doing so, and the impact of its marginal funded activities now. GWWC existed as that place before The Centre for Effective Altruism was founded around it as an organisation with donors and a budget supporting paid employees. If minimal resources were spent on creating the basic infrastructure, and I don’t know if that’s so, but if so, then it had a mega high impact ratio. But it seems wrong to use that to justify keeping on spending more money on more employees doing more marginal projects until the impact from the original resource gets “used up.”
Ok this is all fair. I think, however, that a big fraction of the historical impact is due to on-going activity, of the kind that could continue, rather than being all due to the ‘set up’ generating the stream. And that would mean the historical ratio is a reasonable guide to the future.
This can be hard to see from the outside, but if you look at where new pledgers are coming from, it’s often new press coverage or student group activity. Many also only take the pledge after being nudged by someone in person, even if they had heard about GWWC some time before, so there’s an important role just talking to lots of people about the pledge. These kinds of activities can be scaled much further.
Moreover, GWWC tries to monitor the number of new pledges generated by new activities and will quit on anything that’s not generating enough. You can see some estimates by Rob of marginal returns above.
Overall, you’d still have to be very pessimistic. Suppose GWWC’s historical leverage ratio is 60. For the future leverage ratio to be less than one, you’d (roughly) need to think there was a 98% chance that marginal activities produced zero returns rather than historical rates of return.
Finally, I think it’s helpful to bear in mind how tiny GWWC is. Suppose taking the GWWC pledge is as ethically demanding as vegetarianism, then it could one day reach 1% of the developed world. Since GWWC only has 1000 members, it has only reached 0.01% of its addressable market. Given such limited penetration, I think it would be surprising if there were no further returns to be had. It’s not as if students at Cambridge (where ~100 people have taken the pledge recently) are radically different from those at other prestigious universities, so we should expect similar efforts to work elsewhere, so GWWC could already be 10x bigger even if just expanded among prestigious universities. If anything you might expect marginal costs per pledge to be dropping at this stage in GWWC’s growth as you benefit from economies of scale and critical mass effects (and there’s some evidence this is happening). Finally, given the chance that 99.99% of the value still lies in the future, it seems well worth spending a sizeable amount of resources now figuring out whether further growth is possible and how best to do it. In some ways, GWWC’s marginal leverage ratio is besides the point: it’s like looking at Google in its early days and deciding whether to invest or not based on whether it’s already profitable.