I can’t speak for Elizabeth, but I also find that that paragraph feels off, for reasons something like:
Conflation of “counterfactual money to high-impact charities” with “your impact”
Maybe even if it’s counterfactually moved, you don’t get to count all the impact from it as your impact, since to avoid double-counting and impact ponzi schemes it’s maybe important to take a “share-of-the-pie” approach to thinking about your impact (here’s my take on that general question), and presumably they get a lot of the credit for their giving
Plus, maybe you do things which are importantly valuable that aren’t about your pledge! It’s at least a plausible reading (though it’s ambiguous) that “double your impact” would be taken as “double your lifetime impact”
As well as sharing credit for their donations with them, you maybe need to share credit for having nudged them to make the pledge with other folks (including but not limited to GWWC)
As you say, their donations may not be counterfactual even in the short-term
Even if a good fraction of them are maybe from outside the community, that’s still a fraction by which it reduces expected impact
Although on average I think it’s likely very good, I’m sure in some cases the EA push towards a few charities that have been verified as highly effective actually does harm by pulling people to give to those over some other charities which were in fact even more effective (but illegibly so)
Man, long-term counterfactuals are hard
Maybe GWWC/EA ends up growing a lot further, so that it reaches effective saturation among ~all relevant audiences
In that world, if someone was open to taking the GWWC pledge, they’d likely do it eventually, even if they are currently not at all connected to the community
Now, none of these points are blatant errors, or make me want to say “what were you thinking?!?”. But I feel taken together the picture is that in fact there’s a lot of complexity to the question of how impact should be counted in that case, and the text doesn’t help the reader to understand that there’s a lot of complexity or how to navigate thinking about it, but instead cheerfully presents the most favourable possible interpretation. It just has a bit of a vibe of slightly-underhand sales tactics, or something?
Thanks Owen—I think those things are all reasonable—we might look to update this paragraph on the blog and update our messaging around this! It’s always a challenge to write in a way that’s engaging and legible to those outside the community, and also reflects all of the nuance expected in the community. We of course, always try to do our best, but sometimes we might miss the mark and we’re always open to changing our minds!
I can’t speak for Elizabeth, but I also find that that paragraph feels off, for reasons something like:
Conflation of “counterfactual money to high-impact charities” with “your impact”
Maybe even if it’s counterfactually moved, you don’t get to count all the impact from it as your impact, since to avoid double-counting and impact ponzi schemes it’s maybe important to take a “share-of-the-pie” approach to thinking about your impact (here’s my take on that general question), and presumably they get a lot of the credit for their giving
Plus, maybe you do things which are importantly valuable that aren’t about your pledge! It’s at least a plausible reading (though it’s ambiguous) that “double your impact” would be taken as “double your lifetime impact”
As well as sharing credit for their donations with them, you maybe need to share credit for having nudged them to make the pledge with other folks (including but not limited to GWWC)
As you say, their donations may not be counterfactual even in the short-term
Even if a good fraction of them are maybe from outside the community, that’s still a fraction by which it reduces expected impact
Although on average I think it’s likely very good, I’m sure in some cases the EA push towards a few charities that have been verified as highly effective actually does harm by pulling people to give to those over some other charities which were in fact even more effective (but illegibly so)
Man, long-term counterfactuals are hard
Maybe GWWC/EA ends up growing a lot further, so that it reaches effective saturation among ~all relevant audiences
In that world, if someone was open to taking the GWWC pledge, they’d likely do it eventually, even if they are currently not at all connected to the community
Now, none of these points are blatant errors, or make me want to say “what were you thinking?!?”. But I feel taken together the picture is that in fact there’s a lot of complexity to the question of how impact should be counted in that case, and the text doesn’t help the reader to understand that there’s a lot of complexity or how to navigate thinking about it, but instead cheerfully presents the most favourable possible interpretation. It just has a bit of a vibe of slightly-underhand sales tactics, or something?
Thanks Owen—I think those things are all reasonable—we might look to update this paragraph on the blog and update our messaging around this! It’s always a challenge to write in a way that’s engaging and legible to those outside the community, and also reflects all of the nuance expected in the community. We of course, always try to do our best, but sometimes we might miss the mark and we’re always open to changing our minds!