What I can say is that I’m confident that the suggestions we’ve offered a) will be helpful rather than harmful and b) are substantially better than just randomly signing up for a volunteer opportunity.
I agree that’s totally fair! And I appreciate you doing that work.
As a side note, you seem to have a lot more faith in the efficient markets hypothesis as it applies to organizational behavior than I do! I don’t think I have ever encountered an institutional ecosystem that was unburdened by poor strategic thinking, inefficient legacy practices, and failure to coordinate complementary or duplicative efforts. In that regard, I’ve actually been pleasantly surprised with how high-functioning the progressive organizing space seems to be on the whole.
I’m not sure this is a side note… this might be the main crux of our disagreement!
My prior is that a team of smart non-experts uncovering some large tactical error in large well-funded groups that are highly incentivized to not have errors of that type is certainly possible and actually quite achievable, but probably takes on the order of >4K hours of work. I also think it is easy to think you have found an error that is not in fact an error. I’m not sure how much time you’ve spent on this?
I do have massive uncertainty about how true the efficient market hypothesis is, for a variety of domains.
My experience has been that across most domains, there is kind of a Pareto-optimality to coming in as an outsider and trying to find superior giving or intervention opportunities. It usually takes only a few hours of research to determine an approach that will be above average. It may take a couple hundred hours to find opportunities that will be in the top 10-20%. And unless you get lucky early on, it can easily take more like the 4k you’re describing to find the very best that’s out there. So it depends on what your standard for excellence is and the opportunity cost of the time you’re willing to put in.
I agree that’s totally fair! And I appreciate you doing that work.
I’m not sure this is a side note… this might be the main crux of our disagreement!
My prior is that a team of smart non-experts uncovering some large tactical error in large well-funded groups that are highly incentivized to not have errors of that type is certainly possible and actually quite achievable, but probably takes on the order of >4K hours of work. I also think it is easy to think you have found an error that is not in fact an error. I’m not sure how much time you’ve spent on this?
I do have massive uncertainty about how true the efficient market hypothesis is, for a variety of domains.
My experience has been that across most domains, there is kind of a Pareto-optimality to coming in as an outsider and trying to find superior giving or intervention opportunities. It usually takes only a few hours of research to determine an approach that will be above average. It may take a couple hundred hours to find opportunities that will be in the top 10-20%. And unless you get lucky early on, it can easily take more like the 4k you’re describing to find the very best that’s out there. So it depends on what your standard for excellence is and the opportunity cost of the time you’re willing to put in.