Hm, I think the understanding that “$5 spent to buy a net has marginal impact, but $5 to an EA fund does not” isn’t quite right. You may be correct that the $5 has a lower probability of changing anything at the margins in a fund, but you should multiply that probability by the expected impact of the change.
To pick an analogy from the animal suffering wing: is it better to reduce $5 spent on a chicken or $5 on a cow? Naively you might think “a cow costs $5000, chicken costs $5, so at the margins you should always pick chicken, cuz that’s guaranteed to do something”. But that excludes the expected value of the impact; any specific cow purchase only has a 1/1000 chance of being the one that pushes it over the line, but if (for example) the cow life was actually worth 2000x more than a chicken, than the expected value of your impact is better on the cow.
(Yes, I’m making lots of simplifying assumptions here—just trying to provide the intuition, not actually do a moral analysis!)
Hm, I think the understanding that “$5 spent to buy a net has marginal impact, but $5 to an EA fund does not” isn’t quite right. You may be correct that the $5 has a lower probability of changing anything at the margins in a fund, but you should multiply that probability by the expected impact of the change.
To pick an analogy from the animal suffering wing: is it better to reduce $5 spent on a chicken or $5 on a cow? Naively you might think “a cow costs $5000, chicken costs $5, so at the margins you should always pick chicken, cuz that’s guaranteed to do something”. But that excludes the expected value of the impact; any specific cow purchase only has a 1/1000 chance of being the one that pushes it over the line, but if (for example) the cow life was actually worth 2000x more than a chicken, than the expected value of your impact is better on the cow.
(Yes, I’m making lots of simplifying assumptions here—just trying to provide the intuition, not actually do a moral analysis!)