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 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.