In most cases, we find that the optimal spending schedule is between 5% and 15% better than the ‘default’ strategy of just spending the interest one accrues and generally between 5% to 35% better than a naive projection of the community’s current spending rate
I am curious about the right way to think about this. One voice in my head is saying “OMG here is One Simple Trick to get 5-35% extra lifetime impact for the entire EA community—just lower our bar for spending until we are spending X% per year as the schedule indicates!” Another voice in my head is saying “Huh, 35% extra lifetime impact is small potatoes actually, there’s probably all sorts of mistakes we are making that, if corrected, would yield similar effects. Maybe I should be trying to identify and correct those mistakes instead.”
I lean more towards the first voice than the second currently.
A third voice is saying “Well, clearly lowering our bar for spending that much would be a terrible idea, therefore something about this model must be wrong—but which part specifically?”
The model assumes gradually diminishing returns to spending within the next year, but the intuitions behind your third voice think that much higher spending would involve marginal returns that are a lot smaller OR ~zero OR negative?
Huh, now that you mention it, I think the third voice thinks that much higher spending would be negative, not just a lot smaller or zero. So maybe that’s what’s going on: The third voice intuits that there are backfire risks along the lines of “EA gets a reputation for being ridiculously profligate” that the model doesn’t model?
Maybe another thing that’s going on is that maybe we literally are funding all the opportunities that seem all-things-net-positive to us. The model assumes an infinite supply of opportunities, of diminishing quality, but in fact maybe there are literally only finitely many and we’ve exhausted them all.
I am curious about the right way to think about this. One voice in my head is saying “OMG here is One Simple Trick to get 5-35% extra lifetime impact for the entire EA community—just lower our bar for spending until we are spending X% per year as the schedule indicates!” Another voice in my head is saying “Huh, 35% extra lifetime impact is small potatoes actually, there’s probably all sorts of mistakes we are making that, if corrected, would yield similar effects. Maybe I should be trying to identify and correct those mistakes instead.”
I lean more towards the first voice than the second currently.
A third voice is saying “Well, clearly lowering our bar for spending that much would be a terrible idea, therefore something about this model must be wrong—but which part specifically?”
The model assumes gradually diminishing returns to spending within the next year, but the intuitions behind your third voice think that much higher spending would involve marginal returns that are a lot smaller OR ~zero OR negative?
Huh, now that you mention it, I think the third voice thinks that much higher spending would be negative, not just a lot smaller or zero. So maybe that’s what’s going on: The third voice intuits that there are backfire risks along the lines of “EA gets a reputation for being ridiculously profligate” that the model doesn’t model?
Maybe another thing that’s going on is that maybe we literally are funding all the opportunities that seem all-things-net-positive to us. The model assumes an infinite supply of opportunities, of diminishing quality, but in fact maybe there are literally only finitely many and we’ve exhausted them all.
A counter to that second thing is: Well we can always just give to GiveDirectly or something like that.