Some interesting points John, and I agree that blame can be manipulated to mean what we want it to mean for a purpose. But—this was more directed at the measurement of impact in EA meta-orgs and individuals. If some EA org claims to have directed $200,000 of donations to effective charities for a spend of $100,000, the cost-benefit ratio would be 1:2. But I’m not convinced that this is the whole picture, and if we’re not measuring this type of thing correctly, we could be spending $100,000 to raise only $99,999 counterfactually and not realising it.
One example is that I rarely see the cost-benefit done for where this money might have gone otherwise, even when it is counterfactual. Maybe it would have gone to a pretty good charity instead of a great one, and so we shouldn’t be able to pull the full value from that. And maybe that $1,000 donation made to AMF would have happened anyway. And all sorts of other complicated events.
I’m just making the point that things are, I believe, more complicated than we generally make them out to be.
Some interesting points John, and I agree that blame can be manipulated to mean what we want it to mean for a purpose. But—this was more directed at the measurement of impact in EA meta-orgs and individuals. If some EA org claims to have directed $200,000 of donations to effective charities for a spend of $100,000, the cost-benefit ratio would be 1:2. But I’m not convinced that this is the whole picture, and if we’re not measuring this type of thing correctly, we could be spending $100,000 to raise only $99,999 counterfactually and not realising it.
One example is that I rarely see the cost-benefit done for where this money might have gone otherwise, even when it is counterfactual. Maybe it would have gone to a pretty good charity instead of a great one, and so we shouldn’t be able to pull the full value from that. And maybe that $1,000 donation made to AMF would have happened anyway. And all sorts of other complicated events.
I’m just making the point that things are, I believe, more complicated than we generally make them out to be.