[...] It can easily be demoralising to compare ourselves to others who are achieving a lot more than us.
Personally I don’t feel demoralized when I think about others doing a lot more good than me (either though their donations or direct work) and I think that’s because I mostly just care that the world/future is better, not who makes it better.
Learning that others are doing a fantastic job making the world better doesn’t cause me to think that my expected achievements are smaller than I previously thought. It causes me to think they’re smaller in a relative sense, but I don’t care about that.
Rather, if anything, learning about very successful do-gooders causes me to update to think that my expected achievements may be larger than I currently think if I have some chance of emulating their extreme success. That’s a reason to be happy, not demoralized.
The fact that total EA funding increased substantially recently should cause me to update to believe that the marginal cost-effectiveness of donations I make now and over the course of my lifetime will be less than I previously thought, but not that much less cost-effective.
I’ve long felt that we’re nowhere to close to the world where the marginal cost-effectiveness of the best giving opportunities is low enough to mean it’s not worth donating altruistically. If we lived in a world where the best giving opportunity had GiveDirectly’s cost-effectiveness, I’d still find the giving opportunities cost-effective enough to want to donate a substantial amount of my money.
But the reality is we live in a world where GiveWell continues to find giving opportunities that are 7-8x more effective, and some giving opportunities in other cause areas seem to be 10-100x more cost-effective than GiveDirectly at the margin. So the small cost-effectiveness update above is not enough to make me doubt whether it’s actually worth it to me to donate. It still seems clearly worth it.
Personally I don’t feel demoralized when I think about others doing a lot more good than me (either though their donations or direct work) and I think that’s because I mostly just care that the world/future is better, not who makes it better.
Learning that others are doing a fantastic job making the world better doesn’t cause me to think that my expected achievements are smaller than I previously thought. It causes me to think they’re smaller in a relative sense, but I don’t care about that.
Rather, if anything, learning about very successful do-gooders causes me to update to think that my expected achievements may be larger than I currently think if I have some chance of emulating their extreme success. That’s a reason to be happy, not demoralized.
The fact that total EA funding increased substantially recently should cause me to update to believe that the marginal cost-effectiveness of donations I make now and over the course of my lifetime will be less than I previously thought, but not that much less cost-effective.
I’ve long felt that we’re nowhere to close to the world where the marginal cost-effectiveness of the best giving opportunities is low enough to mean it’s not worth donating altruistically. If we lived in a world where the best giving opportunity had GiveDirectly’s cost-effectiveness, I’d still find the giving opportunities cost-effective enough to want to donate a substantial amount of my money.
But the reality is we live in a world where GiveWell continues to find giving opportunities that are 7-8x more effective, and some giving opportunities in other cause areas seem to be 10-100x more cost-effective than GiveDirectly at the margin. So the small cost-effectiveness update above is not enough to make me doubt whether it’s actually worth it to me to donate. It still seems clearly worth it.