Sorry to revive a dead comment just to argue, but I’m going to disagree about the claims made here for most of what EA as a movement does, even if it’s completely right in many narrowly defined cases.
In most cases where we see that other funders have committed their funds before we arrive, you say that we should view it counterfactually. I think this is probably myopic. EA is a large funder, and this is an iterated dilemma—other actors are ‘live’ in the relevant sense, and will change their strategies based on knowing our decisions. The cooperative and overall better solution, if we can get other actors to participate in this pareto-improving change in strategy, is to explicitly cooperate, or at least embrace a decision theory that lets us do so.
(See the discussion here that pointed me back to this comment, where I make a similar argument. And in the post, I point to where Givewell is actively using counterfactual reasoning when the other decisions are most certainly ‘live’, because again, it’s an iterated game, and the other funders have already said they are adjusting their funding levels to account for the funding that EA provides.)
Sorry to revive a dead comment just to argue, but I’m going to disagree about the claims made here for most of what EA as a movement does, even if it’s completely right in many narrowly defined cases.
In most cases where we see that other funders have committed their funds before we arrive, you say that we should view it counterfactually. I think this is probably myopic. EA is a large funder, and this is an iterated dilemma—other actors are ‘live’ in the relevant sense, and will change their strategies based on knowing our decisions. The cooperative and overall better solution, if we can get other actors to participate in this pareto-improving change in strategy, is to explicitly cooperate, or at least embrace a decision theory that lets us do so.
(See the discussion here that pointed me back to this comment, where I make a similar argument. And in the post, I point to where Givewell is actively using counterfactual reasoning when the other decisions are most certainly ‘live’, because again, it’s an iterated game, and the other funders have already said they are adjusting their funding levels to account for the funding that EA provides.)