Kind of unrelated, but I’ve wondered about these first two considerations that people use to pick a charity, as listed above:
1) which cause is most important 2) which interventions in the cause are most effective
Couldn’t there be a cause that is extremely important but just that don’t have any good interventions? Maybe there is a “most effective” intervention for this cause, but it’s still not that good, and donating to that intervention doesn’t really result in much.
If there aren’t any good interventions (including researching the problem further to identify good direct interventions), then presumably the cause isn’t so important; it would rate low on the tractability scale.
Maybe a weird corner case is saving/investing to donate to the cause later?
I think 1) and 2) are basically backwards. You should support whichever interventions are most effective, regardless of cause, and if these happen to fall into one cause, then that’s the most important cause.
I agree that all that really matters is how effective a particular intervention will be in reducing suffering for the amount of money you plan to donate. Other metrics (especially neglectedness) are just heuristics.
I think it’s unfortunate we used the word “importance” for one of the factors, since it could also be understood to mean overall how valuable it is to work on something. I think many use the word “scale” now instead for the factor.
If you prioritized by scale only, then you can make a problem arbitrarily large in scale, to the point of uselessness, e.g. “prevent all future suffering”.
Presumably wild animal suffering is also much greater in scale than factory farming (or at least the suffering of the farmed animals, setting other effects aside), but it receives much less support since, in part, so far, it seems much less tractable. (Wild animal welfare is still a legitimate cause, though, and it does get support. Wild Animal Initiative was just recommended as a top charity by Animal Charity Evaluators.)
Kind of unrelated, but I’ve wondered about these first two considerations that people use to pick a charity, as listed above:
Couldn’t there be a cause that is extremely important but just that don’t have any good interventions? Maybe there is a “most effective” intervention for this cause, but it’s still not that good, and donating to that intervention doesn’t really result in much.
If there aren’t any good interventions (including researching the problem further to identify good direct interventions), then presumably the cause isn’t so important; it would rate low on the tractability scale.
Maybe a weird corner case is saving/investing to donate to the cause later?
I think 1) and 2) are basically backwards. You should support whichever interventions are most effective, regardless of cause, and if these happen to fall into one cause, then that’s the most important cause.
Ah, okay. So tractability is built into the term “most important”?
I thought they were two separate concepts: https://concepts.effectivealtruism.org/concepts/importance-neglectedness-tractability/
I agree that all that really matters is how effective a particular intervention will be in reducing suffering for the amount of money you plan to donate. Other metrics (especially neglectedness) are just heuristics.
I think it’s unfortunate we used the word “importance” for one of the factors, since it could also be understood to mean overall how valuable it is to work on something. I think many use the word “scale” now instead for the factor.
If you prioritized by scale only, then you can make a problem arbitrarily large in scale, to the point of uselessness, e.g. “prevent all future suffering”.
Presumably wild animal suffering is also much greater in scale than factory farming (or at least the suffering of the farmed animals, setting other effects aside), but it receives much less support since, in part, so far, it seems much less tractable. (Wild animal welfare is still a legitimate cause, though, and it does get support. Wild Animal Initiative was just recommended as a top charity by Animal Charity Evaluators.)