I agree—I was talking a bit too loosely. When I said “assign credit of 30% of X” I meant “assign counterfactual impact of 30% of X”. My point was just that even if you do add up all the counterfactual impacts (ignoring that this is a conceptual mistake like you point out), they rarely sum to more than 100%, so it’s still not a big issue.
I’m not sure I follow the first paragraph about leveraging other groups.
You argued that counterfactual impact may be smaller than it appears. But it may also be larger than it first appears due to leveraging other orgs away from ineffective activities. e.g. an NGO successfully advocates for a policy change P1 - the benefits of P1 is their counterfactual impact. But as a result of the proven success of this type of project, 100 other NGOs start working on similar projects where before they worked on ineffective projects. This latter effect should also be counted as the first org’s counterfactual impact. This could be understood as leveraging additional money into an effective space.
I don’t agree. His logic entails that money/effort you leverage shouldn’t be counted as your own counterfactual impact. If FHI convinces e.g. the UK government that biorisk is worth spending money on, then on Joey’s approach, FHI would be wrong to count this additional money as it’s own impact.
I agree—I was talking a bit too loosely. When I said “assign credit of 30% of X” I meant “assign counterfactual impact of 30% of X”. My point was just that even if you do add up all the counterfactual impacts (ignoring that this is a conceptual mistake like you point out), they rarely sum to more than 100%, so it’s still not a big issue.
I’m not sure I follow the first paragraph about leveraging other groups.
You argued that counterfactual impact may be smaller than it appears. But it may also be larger than it first appears due to leveraging other orgs away from ineffective activities. e.g. an NGO successfully advocates for a policy change P1 - the benefits of P1 is their counterfactual impact. But as a result of the proven success of this type of project, 100 other NGOs start working on similar projects where before they worked on ineffective projects. This latter effect should also be counted as the first org’s counterfactual impact. This could be understood as leveraging additional money into an effective space.
Makes sense. I don’t think Joey would object if orgs were counting this though.
I don’t agree. His logic entails that money/effort you leverage shouldn’t be counted as your own counterfactual impact. If FHI convinces e.g. the UK government that biorisk is worth spending money on, then on Joey’s approach, FHI would be wrong to count this additional money as it’s own impact.