This is an empirical question, but at the moment my intuition goes the other way: that the fraction of the benefits of committing coming from commitments to specific organisations is larger than the corresponding fraction of costs. I have two main reasons for thinking this:
The first reason for this is that commitments from existing donors won’t shed that much light on the total amount of “EA money” that will be available: in the first place because personal financial uncertainty means they shouldn’t make firm commitments about all of their giving; in the second place because the amount of EA money that is available will depend in significant part on the rate of influx of new donors, and a lot of the uncertainty will relate to that.
The second reason is that I think organisational decision-making is particularly helped by pushing uncertainty towards zero. The effective difference between a 59% and a 79% chance of getting enough funding may be rather smaller than the difference between a 79% and 99% chance. Organisations may be reluctant to take on new staff if that gives a realistic chance of having to let existing staff go. So the benefits of having organisational certainty rather than just sector-certainty are large. (If we believe this is false, we should perhaps think that orgs should stop holding significant reserves.) I’m not expert in this, would be interested to hear thoughts from people more directly involved in financial planning for EA orgs.
This is an empirical question, but at the moment my intuition goes the other way: that the fraction of the benefits of committing coming from commitments to specific organisations is larger than the corresponding fraction of costs. I have two main reasons for thinking this:
The first reason for this is that commitments from existing donors won’t shed that much light on the total amount of “EA money” that will be available: in the first place because personal financial uncertainty means they shouldn’t make firm commitments about all of their giving; in the second place because the amount of EA money that is available will depend in significant part on the rate of influx of new donors, and a lot of the uncertainty will relate to that.
The second reason is that I think organisational decision-making is particularly helped by pushing uncertainty towards zero. The effective difference between a 59% and a 79% chance of getting enough funding may be rather smaller than the difference between a 79% and 99% chance. Organisations may be reluctant to take on new staff if that gives a realistic chance of having to let existing staff go. So the benefits of having organisational certainty rather than just sector-certainty are large. (If we believe this is false, we should perhaps think that orgs should stop holding significant reserves.) I’m not expert in this, would be interested to hear thoughts from people more directly involved in financial planning for EA orgs.