It seems like most who are risk-hungry enough to try to start a new GiveWell charity enough would also be risk-hungry enough to consider one or another alternative cause area. So for those readers, it would seem useful to also give a counterfactual estimate for funding Open Phil suggested charities. If moving to a different cause can get you an extra order of magnitude of cost-effectiveness, then this will make giving more effective than trying to start a GiveWell charity.
This gets very tricky very fast. In general, the difference in EV between people’s first and second choice plan is likely to be small in situations with many options, if only because their first and second choice plans are likely to have many of the same qualities (depending on how different a plan has to be to be considered a different plan). Subtracting the most plausible (or something) counterfactual from almost anyone’s impact makes it seem very small.
This is definitely an area we/I would like to explore further, and intend to explore more, but it’s definitely very difficult to do so, given how open-ended and complex each individual evaluation would have to be.
It seems like most who are risk-hungry enough to try to start a new GiveWell charity enough would also be risk-hungry enough to consider one or another alternative cause area. So for those readers, it would seem useful to also give a counterfactual estimate for funding Open Phil suggested charities. If moving to a different cause can get you an extra order of magnitude of cost-effectiveness, then this will make giving more effective than trying to start a GiveWell charity.
This gets very tricky very fast. In general, the difference in EV between people’s first and second choice plan is likely to be small in situations with many options, if only because their first and second choice plans are likely to have many of the same qualities (depending on how different a plan has to be to be considered a different plan). Subtracting the most plausible (or something) counterfactual from almost anyone’s impact makes it seem very small.
This is definitely an area we/I would like to explore further, and intend to explore more, but it’s definitely very difficult to do so, given how open-ended and complex each individual evaluation would have to be.
I have attempted some work on other areas, for example my involvement with veg research could be seen as attempting to quantify the impact of nonhuman animal welfare causes. I’ve also done a bit at looking at the value of cause prioritization as well as a taxonomy of cause prioritization. We at CSH have a lot more of this kind of thing in the works.