In my mind, a significant benefit of impact certificates is that they can feel motivating:
The huge uncertainty about the long-run effects of our actions is a common struggle of community builders and longtermists. Earning to give or working on near-term issues (e.g., corporate farm animal welfare campaigns, or AMF donations) tends to come with a much stronger sense of moral urgency, tighter feedback loops, and a much clearer sense of accomplishment if you actually managed to do something important: 1 million hens are spared from battery cages in country X! You saved 10 lives from malaria in developing countries!
In comparison, the best a longtermist can ever wish for, is “these five people – who I think have good judgment – said something vaguely positive at an event, so I’m probably doing okay”. Even though I buy the empirical and philosophical arguments for EA meta work or longtermism, I personally often find the dearth of costly signals of success somewhat demotivating, and I think others feel similar.
I think impact certificates could fix this issue to some degree, as they do provide such a costly signal.
I also wonder if a lot of people aren’t quitting ETG and doing direct work because they don’t realize just how valuable people would find their work if they did. If they’re currently earning $500k per year and donating half that amount, it feels kind of a downgrade to do direct work for $80k per year and some vague, fuzzy notion of longtermist impact. But if I could offer them a compensation package that includes impact certificates that plausibly have an EV of millions of dollars, the impact difference would become more palpable.
Edit: The “Implicit impact markets without infrastructure” equivalent of this would be to tell people what amount of donations you’d be willing to forego in return for their work. But this is not a costly signal, and thus less credible, and (in my view) also less motivating. Also, people across the EA community are operating with wildly different numbers (e.g., I’ve read that Rohin trades his time for money at a ~10x lower rate than I do, and I think he’s probably adding a lot more value than I am, so collectively we have to be wrong by >10x), and in my view, it’s hard to make them consistent without markets, or at least a lot more dialogue about these tradeoffs.
In my mind, a significant benefit of impact certificates is that they can feel motivating:
The huge uncertainty about the long-run effects of our actions is a common struggle of community builders and longtermists. Earning to give or working on near-term issues (e.g., corporate farm animal welfare campaigns, or AMF donations) tends to come with a much stronger sense of moral urgency, tighter feedback loops, and a much clearer sense of accomplishment if you actually managed to do something important: 1 million hens are spared from battery cages in country X! You saved 10 lives from malaria in developing countries!
In comparison, the best a longtermist can ever wish for, is “these five people – who I think have good judgment – said something vaguely positive at an event, so I’m probably doing okay”. Even though I buy the empirical and philosophical arguments for EA meta work or longtermism, I personally often find the dearth of costly signals of success somewhat demotivating, and I think others feel similar.
I think impact certificates could fix this issue to some degree, as they do provide such a costly signal.
I also wonder if a lot of people aren’t quitting ETG and doing direct work because they don’t realize just how valuable people would find their work if they did. If they’re currently earning $500k per year and donating half that amount, it feels kind of a downgrade to do direct work for $80k per year and some vague, fuzzy notion of longtermist impact. But if I could offer them a compensation package that includes impact certificates that plausibly have an EV of millions of dollars, the impact difference would become more palpable.
Edit: The “Implicit impact markets without infrastructure” equivalent of this would be to tell people what amount of donations you’d be willing to forego in return for their work. But this is not a costly signal, and thus less credible, and (in my view) also less motivating. Also, people across the EA community are operating with wildly different numbers (e.g., I’ve read that Rohin trades his time for money at a ~10x lower rate than I do, and I think he’s probably adding a lot more value than I am, so collectively we have to be wrong by >10x), and in my view, it’s hard to make them consistent without markets, or at least a lot more dialogue about these tradeoffs.