Appreciate the attempt to make headway on the disagreement!
I feel pretty lost when trying to quantify impact at these percentiles. Taking concerns about naive attribution of impact into consideration, I don’t even really know where to start to try to come up with numbers here. I just notice that I have a strong intuition, backed up by something that seems to me like a plausible claim: given that myriad actors always contribute to any outcome, it is hard to imagine that there is one (or a very few) individual(s) that does all of the heavy lifting...
“And how much spread do we need to get here in order to justify a lot of attention going into looking for tail-upsides?”
—Also a good question. I think my answer would be: it depends on the situation and how much up- or downsides come along with looking for tail-upsides. If we’re cautious about the possible adverse effects of impact maximizing mindsets, I agree that it’s often sensible to look for tail-upsides even if they would “only” allow us to double impact. Then there are some situations/problems where I believe the collective rationality mindset, which looks for “how should I and my fellows behave in order to succeed as a community” rather than “how should I act now to maximize the impact I can have as a relatively direct/traceable outcome from my own action?”
I just notice that I have a strong intuition, backed up by something that seems to me like a plausible claim: given that myriad actors always contribute to any outcome, it is hard to imagine that there is one (or a very few) individual(s) that does all of the heavy lifting...
I want to note that this property isn’t a consequence of a power-law distribution. (It’s true of some power laws but not others, depending on the exponent.) I think you’re right about this in most cases (though in some domains like theoretical physics I think it’s more plausible that most of the heavy lifting gets done by a few people).
But even if there aren’t a small number of individuals doing all the heavy lifting, it can still be the case that some people are doing far more than others. For example think of income distribution: it definitely isn’t the case that just a few people earn most of the money, but it definitely is the case that some people earn far more than others. If you were advising someone on how to make as much money as possible, you wouldn’t tell them to chase after the possibility that they could be in the 0.0001%, but you would want them to have an awareness of the shape of the distribution, and some idea of how to find high-paying industries; and if you were advising a lot of people you’d probably want to talk about circumstances in which founding a company would make sense.
Similar reframes might acknowledge that some efforts help facilitate large benefits, while also acknowledging all do-gooding efforts are ultimately co-dependent, not simply additive*? I like the aims of both of you, including here and here, to capture both insights.
(*I’m sceptical of the simplification that “some people are doing far more than others”. Building on Owen’s example, any impact of ‘heavy lifting’ theoretical physicists seems unavoidably co-dependent on people birthing and raising them, food and medical systems keeping them alive, research systems making their research doable/credible/usable, people not misusing their research to make atomic weapons, etc. This echos the points made in the ‘conceptual problem’ part of the post)
Appreciate the attempt to make headway on the disagreement!
I feel pretty lost when trying to quantify impact at these percentiles. Taking concerns about naive attribution of impact into consideration, I don’t even really know where to start to try to come up with numbers here. I just notice that I have a strong intuition, backed up by something that seems to me like a plausible claim: given that myriad actors always contribute to any outcome, it is hard to imagine that there is one (or a very few) individual(s) that does all of the heavy lifting...
“And how much spread do we need to get here in order to justify a lot of attention going into looking for tail-upsides?” —Also a good question. I think my answer would be: it depends on the situation and how much up- or downsides come along with looking for tail-upsides. If we’re cautious about the possible adverse effects of impact maximizing mindsets, I agree that it’s often sensible to look for tail-upsides even if they would “only” allow us to double impact. Then there are some situations/problems where I believe the collective rationality mindset, which looks for “how should I and my fellows behave in order to succeed as a community” rather than “how should I act now to maximize the impact I can have as a relatively direct/traceable outcome from my own action?”
Re:
I want to note that this property isn’t a consequence of a power-law distribution. (It’s true of some power laws but not others, depending on the exponent.) I think you’re right about this in most cases (though in some domains like theoretical physics I think it’s more plausible that most of the heavy lifting gets done by a few people).
But even if there aren’t a small number of individuals doing all the heavy lifting, it can still be the case that some people are doing far more than others. For example think of income distribution: it definitely isn’t the case that just a few people earn most of the money, but it definitely is the case that some people earn far more than others. If you were advising someone on how to make as much money as possible, you wouldn’t tell them to chase after the possibility that they could be in the 0.0001%, but you would want them to have an awareness of the shape of the distribution, and some idea of how to find high-paying industries; and if you were advising a lot of people you’d probably want to talk about circumstances in which founding a company would make sense.
Perhaps we could promote the questions:
‘How can I help facilitate the most good?’, or
‘How can I support the most good?’
and not the question:
‘How can I do the most good?’
Similar reframes might acknowledge that some efforts help facilitate large benefits, while also acknowledging all do-gooding efforts are ultimately co-dependent, not simply additive*? I like the aims of both of you, including here and here, to capture both insights.
(*I’m sceptical of the simplification that “some people are doing far more than others”. Building on Owen’s example, any impact of ‘heavy lifting’ theoretical physicists seems unavoidably co-dependent on people birthing and raising them, food and medical systems keeping them alive, research systems making their research doable/credible/usable, people not misusing their research to make atomic weapons, etc. This echos the points made in the ‘conceptual problem’ part of the post)