A major case where this is relevant is funding community-building, fundraising, and other “meta” projects. I agree that “just imagine there was a (crude) market in impact certificates, and take the actions you guess you’d take there” is a good strategy, but in that world where are organizations like CEA (or perhaps even Givewell) getting impact certificates to sell? Perhaps whenever someone starts a project they grant some of the impact equity to their local EA group (which in turn grants some of it to CEA), but if so the fraction granted would probably be small, whereas people arguing for meta often seem to be acting like it would be a majority stake.
A major case where this is relevant is funding community-building, fundraising, and other “meta” projects. I agree that “just imagine there was a (crude) market in impact certificates, and take the actions you guess you’d take there” is a good strategy, but in that world where are organizations like CEA (or perhaps even Givewell) getting impact certificates to sell? Perhaps whenever someone starts a project they grant some of the impact equity to their local EA group (which in turn grants some of it to CEA), but if so the fraction granted would probably be small, whereas people arguing for meta often seem to be acting like it would be a majority stake.