Eight years later, I still think this post is basically correct. My argument is more plausible the more one expects a lot of parts of society to play a role in shaping how the future unfolds. If one believes that a small group of people (who can be identified in advance and who aren’t already extremely well known) will have dramatically more influence over the future than most other parts of the world, then we might expect somewhat larger differences in cost-effectiveness.
One thing people sometimes forget about my point is that I’m not making any claims about the sign of impacts. I expect that in many cases, random charities have net negative impacts due to various side effects of their activities. The argument doesn’t say that random charities are within 1⁄100 times as good as the best charities but rather that all charities have a lot of messy side effects on the world, and when those side effects are counted, it’s unlikely that the total impact that one charity has on the world (for good or ill) will be many orders of magnitude higher than the total impact that another charity has on the world (for good or ill).
I think maybe the main value of this post is to help people keep in mind how complex the effects of our actions are and that many different people are doing work that’s somewhat relevant to what we care about (for good or ill). I think it’s a common trend for young people to feel like they’re doing something special, and that they have new, exciting answers that the older generations didn’t. Then as we mature and learn about more different parts of the world, we tend to become less convinced that we’re correct or that the work we’re doing is unique. On the other hand, it can still be the case that our work may be a lot more important (relative to our values) than most other things people are doing.
Eight years later, I still think this post is basically correct. My argument is more plausible the more one expects a lot of parts of society to play a role in shaping how the future unfolds. If one believes that a small group of people (who can be identified in advance and who aren’t already extremely well known) will have dramatically more influence over the future than most other parts of the world, then we might expect somewhat larger differences in cost-effectiveness.
One thing people sometimes forget about my point is that I’m not making any claims about the sign of impacts. I expect that in many cases, random charities have net negative impacts due to various side effects of their activities. The argument doesn’t say that random charities are within 1⁄100 times as good as the best charities but rather that all charities have a lot of messy side effects on the world, and when those side effects are counted, it’s unlikely that the total impact that one charity has on the world (for good or ill) will be many orders of magnitude higher than the total impact that another charity has on the world (for good or ill).
I think maybe the main value of this post is to help people keep in mind how complex the effects of our actions are and that many different people are doing work that’s somewhat relevant to what we care about (for good or ill). I think it’s a common trend for young people to feel like they’re doing something special, and that they have new, exciting answers that the older generations didn’t. Then as we mature and learn about more different parts of the world, we tend to become less convinced that we’re correct or that the work we’re doing is unique. On the other hand, it can still be the case that our work may be a lot more important (relative to our values) than most other things people are doing.