On 2, I like this point about the distribution being shaped by the choices of others, I think it is quite true that if more people cared about impact it would be a lot harder to counterfatually achieve very high impact actions (because there would be so much ‘competition’ with other impact seekers). Reminiscent of how financial markets are pretty efficient because so many people are seeking to make money trading—I think if a similar number of people were looking to succeed in the ‘impact market’ there wouldn’t be these super cost-effective low-hanging fruit left (lead elimination and the like).
I think this then relates to point 1, as if there was an efficient impact market, it would be quite surprising for impact to be heavy-tailed. But as long as most people are focused on things other than impact I think my default assumption is it won’t be too hard to find things that are a lot higher impact than the average. But I agree that this is not definitive and in areas like longtermist interventions where measurement is so hard we don’t have empirical evidence of this.
On 2, I like this point about the distribution being shaped by the choices of others, I think it is quite true that if more people cared about impact it would be a lot harder to counterfatually achieve very high impact actions (because there would be so much ‘competition’ with other impact seekers). Reminiscent of how financial markets are pretty efficient because so many people are seeking to make money trading—I think if a similar number of people were looking to succeed in the ‘impact market’ there wouldn’t be these super cost-effective low-hanging fruit left (lead elimination and the like).
I think this then relates to point 1, as if there was an efficient impact market, it would be quite surprising for impact to be heavy-tailed. But as long as most people are focused on things other than impact I think my default assumption is it won’t be too hard to find things that are a lot higher impact than the average. But I agree that this is not definitive and in areas like longtermist interventions where measurement is so hard we don’t have empirical evidence of this.