--We should do fewer EAGs and prioritize funding more local groups. I think the limited data we have points in the direction that EAGs are significantly less cost effective than local groups. There was a survey of people doing longtermist work run by Open Phil in 2020 that asked respondents to rate various EA organizations/content/groups on a scale from “hindered my positive impact a lot” to “helped me a lot to have a positive impact”. They assigned point values and averaged responses, then calculating “net impact points” to create a standard metric to use to compare across and displaying a “% of net impact points” both weighted[9] and not weighted, which should give a sense of what proportion of impact each item was responsible for. As you can see in the chart here, CEA makes up 6% of these, and elsewhere it’s said that EAGs are responsible for roughly half of CEA’s impact, so assume EAGs are roughly 3% of net impact points (NIP). This means that EAGs are less valuable than everything else in the chart, and that local groups are responsible for over 2x the % of NIP. We only have rough data right now, but one estimate puts total expenditure on EA groups at ~$1 million in 2019[10]. In that same year, there were 3 EAGxs and 2 EAGs, which, taking estimates from the earlier post on costs,[11] likely cost around $5.6 million, over 5x the cost.
This might deserve it’s own short commentary. It gets buried a bit in the piece but it’s an important point/argument and I haven’t seen others doing this sort of analysis.
--We should do fewer EAGs and prioritize funding more local groups. I think the limited data we have points in the direction that EAGs are significantly less cost effective than local groups. There was a survey of people doing longtermist work run by Open Phil in 2020 that asked respondents to rate various EA organizations/content/groups on a scale from “hindered my positive impact a lot” to “helped me a lot to have a positive impact”. They assigned point values and averaged responses, then calculating “net impact points” to create a standard metric to use to compare across and displaying a “% of net impact points” both weighted[9] and not weighted, which should give a sense of what proportion of impact each item was responsible for. As you can see in the chart here, CEA makes up 6% of these, and elsewhere it’s said that EAGs are responsible for roughly half of CEA’s impact, so assume EAGs are roughly 3% of net impact points (NIP). This means that EAGs are less valuable than everything else in the chart, and that local groups are responsible for over 2x the % of NIP. We only have rough data right now, but one estimate puts total expenditure on EA groups at ~$1 million in 2019[10]. In that same year, there were 3 EAGxs and 2 EAGs, which, taking estimates from the earlier post on costs,[11] likely cost around $5.6 million, over 5x the cost.
This might deserve it’s own short commentary. It gets buried a bit in the piece but it’s an important point/argument and I haven’t seen others doing this sort of analysis.