I do not understand. For practical purposes it makes sense to me, we should not take more than 100% credit for anything we do.
If multiple organizations cooperate, they create a bigger impact, that is understandable. The impact is always 100% no matter how big it is. We can say organizations A, B and C and multiple other factors D created together impact 100%, saying each organization has 100% impact is misleading and can lead us to the wrong conclusion about how effective we are compared to others who are not using this math magic.
Maybe it would make sense for me if counterfactual was always strict zero and every action was completely irreplaceable and it was all or nothing forever.
In the real world and what I think this article is referring to is that organizations are evaluating their impact using surveys and when they find out person is giving 10 000$ a year and they were strongly influenced by their activities they add the money to their impact … and 10 other organizations also do it.
But a lot of those organization activities would be very replaceable and even if not, it is rarely all or nothing.
Then someone adds the impact of all those organizations together and says EA created impact 100x bigger than it actually has
When life is saved it doesn’t matter whether by one person or by 100 people. When 1 impact = 1 life saved, 10 people cooperating on saving one life cannot have 10 impacts together. And if they want to get some representative numbers, they should divide the impact between themselves.
See the post following this one explaining why this is not a puzzle.
I do not understand. For practical purposes it makes sense to me, we should not take more than 100% credit for anything we do.
If multiple organizations cooperate, they create a bigger impact, that is understandable. The impact is always 100% no matter how big it is. We can say organizations A, B and C and multiple other factors D created together impact 100%, saying each organization has 100% impact is misleading and can lead us to the wrong conclusion about how effective we are compared to others who are not using this math magic.
Maybe it would make sense for me if counterfactual was always strict zero and every action was completely irreplaceable and it was all or nothing forever.
In the real world and what I think this article is referring to is that organizations are evaluating their impact using surveys and when they find out person is giving 10 000$ a year and they were strongly influenced by their activities they add the money to their impact … and 10 other organizations also do it.
But a lot of those organization activities would be very replaceable and even if not, it is rarely all or nothing.
Then someone adds the impact of all those organizations together and says EA created impact 100x bigger than it actually has
When life is saved it doesn’t matter whether by one person or by 100 people. When 1 impact = 1 life saved, 10 people cooperating on saving one life cannot have 10 impacts together. And if they want to get some representative numbers, they should divide the impact between themselves.