Yeah, I think these changes are unlikely, I was just trying to test your thoughts on the subject. I believe there likelihood is high enough it should be something in the back of our minds in case we need to quickly change our plans, but not so likely we need to take focus away from what we’re currently doing to make new plans, until we receive real evidence such dramatic changes will indeed happen.
For the record, for all values of “Givewell-beating donation target”, whether recommended traditional charity, or narrow space for funding for an Open Phil consideration as an incredible opportunity, I expect most interventions a consensus of effective altruist would agree, e.g., beat AMF, would only beat AMF for a few months, basically so they receive enough funding to sustain an experiment to see if such a new initiative would work and be scalable. Once they receive seed funding, they wouldn’t be worth funding again at least until results confirm it’s a valuable investment, so they’d hit sharply diminishing marginal returns.
This is assuming we’re judging the value of a cause or intervention with only conventional measures, like expected or demonstrable number of QALYs, and not other things like the “important/valuable, crowded/neglected, tractable” heuristic, e.g., Open Phil uses. I personally still don’t know what I would conclude the output of that analysis would be.
Yeah, I think these changes are unlikely, I was just trying to test your thoughts on the subject. I believe there likelihood is high enough it should be something in the back of our minds in case we need to quickly change our plans, but not so likely we need to take focus away from what we’re currently doing to make new plans, until we receive real evidence such dramatic changes will indeed happen.
For the record, for all values of “Givewell-beating donation target”, whether recommended traditional charity, or narrow space for funding for an Open Phil consideration as an incredible opportunity, I expect most interventions a consensus of effective altruist would agree, e.g., beat AMF, would only beat AMF for a few months, basically so they receive enough funding to sustain an experiment to see if such a new initiative would work and be scalable. Once they receive seed funding, they wouldn’t be worth funding again at least until results confirm it’s a valuable investment, so they’d hit sharply diminishing marginal returns.
This is assuming we’re judging the value of a cause or intervention with only conventional measures, like expected or demonstrable number of QALYs, and not other things like the “important/valuable, crowded/neglected, tractable” heuristic, e.g., Open Phil uses. I personally still don’t know what I would conclude the output of that analysis would be.