With a quick Fermi estimate from my cycle ride I think this might be worthwhile even on short-term impacts.
There are maybe 50 employees at EA orgs. Perhaps they plan to donate $200,000 in the next year. Suppose that a correct answer to this question adds +20% to the value of a donation (roughly the amount of the tax benefit, which people mostly weren’t claiming to be the biggest effect). Suppose further that this much-more-in-depth-consideration than previously existed has a net 5% chance of nudging people towards making the better decision, whichever that is. Then that would be worth ~~$2,000 even on a 1-year timescale. Which is plausibly worth a day.
Those numbers are close and messy enough I don’t feel happy supporting it just on short-term impact, though.
Many people won’t donate to their own org either way, and many of those who do won’t care about norms. This will probably include a large majority of donations.
Evaluated just on the near-term impacts I’d agree with you (even if total time was, I guess, around a day, which is not huge).
The reason this seems more important to me is that it’s part of the community culture. Building a community with the right culture seems both:
easier to get done while everything is relatively small;
an important determinant of the long-term impact of effective altruism.
With a quick Fermi estimate from my cycle ride I think this might be worthwhile even on short-term impacts.
There are maybe 50 employees at EA orgs. Perhaps they plan to donate $200,000 in the next year. Suppose that a correct answer to this question adds +20% to the value of a donation (roughly the amount of the tax benefit, which people mostly weren’t claiming to be the biggest effect). Suppose further that this much-more-in-depth-consideration than previously existed has a net 5% chance of nudging people towards making the better decision, whichever that is. Then that would be worth ~~$2,000 even on a 1-year timescale. Which is plausibly worth a day.
Those numbers are close and messy enough I don’t feel happy supporting it just on short-term impact, though.
Many people won’t donate to their own org either way, and many of those who do won’t care about norms. This will probably include a large majority of donations.