Yes. Though where it gets tricky is making the assessment at the margin.
I was wondering about this too. Is your calculation of the marginal cost per plan change just the costs for 2016 divided by the plan changes in 2016? That doesn’t seem to be an assessment at the margin.
However, like I say in the post, I’d caution against focusing too much on the marginal multiplier since I think more of our impact over 2017 will come from long-term growth rather the 2017 plan changes.
One margin is just running more workshops and that seems to have roughly the same marginal cost as our annual average. We just aren’t close to running out of promising people interested in coming along.
To second this I was very surprised how little the attendance to the careers workshops we ran at Cambridge dropped off. I think we ended up doing five 200 person careers workshops before they stopped selling out.
If there is similar (or even only half as much) demand at other universities then there is a lot of opportunity to scale.
We actually were running out on other campuses until we figured out how to get online advertising to convert into workshop attendance—now feels we can do several times as many workshops as we’re doing now without running out.
I was wondering about this too. Is your calculation of the marginal cost per plan change just the costs for 2016 divided by the plan changes in 2016? That doesn’t seem to be an assessment at the margin.
Hi Rohin,
For the multipliers, I was trying to make a marginal estimate.
For the costs, there’s a lot more detail here (it’s not simply 2016 costs / 2016 #): https://80000hours.org/2016/12/has-80000-hours-justified-its-costs/#whats-the-marginal-cost-per-plan-change
However, like I say in the post, I’d caution against focusing too much on the marginal multiplier since I think more of our impact over 2017 will come from long-term growth rather the 2017 plan changes.
One margin is just running more workshops and that seems to have roughly the same marginal cost as our annual average. We just aren’t close to running out of promising people interested in coming along.
To second this I was very surprised how little the attendance to the careers workshops we ran at Cambridge dropped off. I think we ended up doing five 200 person careers workshops before they stopped selling out.
If there is similar (or even only half as much) demand at other universities then there is a lot of opportunity to scale.
We actually were running out on other campuses until we figured out how to get online advertising to convert into workshop attendance—now feels we can do several times as many workshops as we’re doing now without running out.