Any opinions about using this as a baseline to compare other EA outreach efforts?
I tend to be in favor, since this seems to be working, kind of tested, scalable, potentially high upside given some tweaks, and so on. I feel more reluctant to do my own outreach after reading this (but I’m saying this in a good way—as a compliment to you)
I’m not sure I understand what you mean by ‘using this as a baseline to compare other EA outreach efforts’? Is there some specific outcome metric you’d want to use as a baseline?
In general, I think what works best in outreach can be pretty context-specific, and I wouldn’t recommend everything I’ve done to people with different goals & constraints.
Being more reluctant to do your own outreach after learning about this makes sense if you think there’s some optimal growth rate in EA which we are at or nearly at. If you learn that I’m doing lots of outreach, then it decreases the value of additional outreach (unless we are not yet at or near the optimal rate of growth).
As one example, I have a tiny project where I publicly measure the effectiveness of Israeli startups (in a Facebook group where people can comment and ask questions), and a big part of my goal is to explain the Israeli tech ecosystem how one even measures impact, and that not all med-tech startups are equal.
I might try to estimate how much it would “cost” me to get one person to a high impact job, and if that “cost” is way more than what you’re doing with the 80k outreach, I should maybe just dump the project. Or in other words, for my project to be worth while, it must be at least POTENTIALLY more cost effective than the 80k outreach. Similar to how if I’d want to run an intervention for global health and wellbeing, I’d want it to at least POTENTIALLY be better than AMF. (in both these examples, 80k and AMF are also tested and scalable, which are two advantages that new projects might not always have)
Any opinions about using this as a baseline to compare other EA outreach efforts?
I tend to be in favor, since this seems to be working, kind of tested, scalable, potentially high upside given some tweaks, and so on. I feel more reluctant to do my own outreach after reading this (but I’m saying this in a good way—as a compliment to you)
I’m not sure I understand what you mean by ‘using this as a baseline to compare other EA outreach efforts’? Is there some specific outcome metric you’d want to use as a baseline?
In general, I think what works best in outreach can be pretty context-specific, and I wouldn’t recommend everything I’ve done to people with different goals & constraints.
Being more reluctant to do your own outreach after learning about this makes sense if you think there’s some optimal growth rate in EA which we are at or nearly at. If you learn that I’m doing lots of outreach, then it decreases the value of additional outreach (unless we are not yet at or near the optimal rate of growth).
As one example, I have a tiny project where I publicly measure the effectiveness of Israeli startups (in a Facebook group where people can comment and ask questions), and a big part of my goal is to explain the Israeli tech ecosystem how one even measures impact, and that not all med-tech startups are equal.
I might try to estimate how much it would “cost” me to get one person to a high impact job, and if that “cost” is way more than what you’re doing with the 80k outreach, I should maybe just dump the project. Or in other words, for my project to be worth while, it must be at least POTENTIALLY more cost effective than the 80k outreach. Similar to how if I’d want to run an intervention for global health and wellbeing, I’d want it to at least POTENTIALLY be better than AMF. (in both these examples, 80k and AMF are also tested and scalable, which are two advantages that new projects might not always have)
(Did this make more sense?)
This makes sense to me, but I don’t think I provided anything in this post which you could easily use to compare to your project here.
How would you go about guessing whether the cost of what you were doing was higher or lower than that of 80k’s outreach?