I still feel there must be a way to flip this somehow and find a way to assign and recognise impact and contributions that feels motivating and uplifiting to everybody
I feel it would be interesting, but not necessarily uplifting, to estimate how much the EA community spends on any given intervention. Let’s return to your Atlantic Shepherd example. Sea Shepherd is one of those classic charities that handles everything in-house from fundraising and awareness-raising to carrying out the actual anti-poaching interventions. The charities typically recommended by EAs, on the other hand, externalise a great deal of their costs.
Imagine we set up “Atlantic Shepherd” as an EA charity. Before it ever received funding, an organisation like Rethink Priorities would likely have helped make the case for ocean interventions. Grantmakers would have supported them in getting started. Animal Charity Evaluators would assess them. Several other charities would recommend them. The 80,000 Hours podcast would feature them. And then there are all the charities working on building the EA community itself, as well as those raising funds on Atlantic Shepherd’s behalf. All of these organisations have spent real resources advancing the cause, yet none of those costs ever appear when analysing Atlantic Shepherd’s cost-effectiveness. It would be entirely possible for the community to be spending twice as much per fish saved as Sea Shepherd does, while the cost-effectiveness analysis still shows Atlantic Shepherd coming out ahead by a wide margin.
Agree on this 100%. I originally wanted to bake in that line of reasoning in this article but I felt it was already controversial enough as it is hahaha. This is another example of everybody claiming marginal impact adding up to 10x of the imapct we actually had.
Happy to write a post about this together at some point!
I feel it would be interesting, but not necessarily uplifting, to estimate how much the EA community spends on any given intervention. Let’s return to your Atlantic Shepherd example. Sea Shepherd is one of those classic charities that handles everything in-house from fundraising and awareness-raising to carrying out the actual anti-poaching interventions. The charities typically recommended by EAs, on the other hand, externalise a great deal of their costs.
Imagine we set up “Atlantic Shepherd” as an EA charity. Before it ever received funding, an organisation like Rethink Priorities would likely have helped make the case for ocean interventions. Grantmakers would have supported them in getting started. Animal Charity Evaluators would assess them. Several other charities would recommend them. The 80,000 Hours podcast would feature them. And then there are all the charities working on building the EA community itself, as well as those raising funds on Atlantic Shepherd’s behalf. All of these organisations have spent real resources advancing the cause, yet none of those costs ever appear when analysing Atlantic Shepherd’s cost-effectiveness. It would be entirely possible for the community to be spending twice as much per fish saved as Sea Shepherd does, while the cost-effectiveness analysis still shows Atlantic Shepherd coming out ahead by a wide margin.
Agree on this 100%. I originally wanted to bake in that line of reasoning in this article but I felt it was already controversial enough as it is hahaha. This is another example of everybody claiming marginal impact adding up to 10x of the imapct we actually had.
Happy to write a post about this together at some point!