We had a bigger group of applications this month (we’ll post about it soon), along with significant unpurchased impact from last month, so now I think the balance is less clear. We’ll see how the next round plays out, and how interested people are in funding the other opportunities.
In the long run and all else equal, it would be great to have additional non-binding estimates and public discussion for projects people are considering buying. The issue is the opportunity cost of the time spent discussing or thinking about them, especially for small projects. I don’t think the character of the problem is really fundamentally different than for GiveWell. You can either spend a long time on scalable interventions, or a little bit of time on non-scalable interventions. You care more about the ratio of (size of opportunity) / (effort).
My guess is that the implementation is not a bottleneck. For example, having a post in this forum and a thread for each project (which may contain links) seems like it could basically work.
And good idea! If we use this forum for it, the posts would have to follow a common format to make it easier for people to calculate the metrics. We’d also need a central place, like a tag, to collect them, so people can compare among them easily. That will be very important.
If you buy my benchmark certificate, we can also convert dollars to utils more easily and draw on certificate prices to inform the estimates.
We had a bigger group of applications this month (we’ll post about it soon), along with significant unpurchased impact from last month, so now I think the balance is less clear. We’ll see how the next round plays out, and how interested people are in funding the other opportunities.
In the long run and all else equal, it would be great to have additional non-binding estimates and public discussion for projects people are considering buying. The issue is the opportunity cost of the time spent discussing or thinking about them, especially for small projects. I don’t think the character of the problem is really fundamentally different than for GiveWell. You can either spend a long time on scalable interventions, or a little bit of time on non-scalable interventions. You care more about the ratio of (size of opportunity) / (effort).
My guess is that the implementation is not a bottleneck. For example, having a post in this forum and a thread for each project (which may contain links) seems like it could basically work.
Looking forward to the results!
And good idea! If we use this forum for it, the posts would have to follow a common format to make it easier for people to calculate the metrics. We’d also need a central place, like a tag, to collect them, so people can compare among them easily. That will be very important.
If you buy my benchmark certificate, we can also convert dollars to utils more easily and draw on certificate prices to inform the estimates.