As you know, I endorse your position, and think that in the ideal distribution—the one in which all of those not earning to give are doing the most valuable things—even more than 80% of people would be ETG. (More precisely, they’d be doing good primarily by donating, as this is the real issue here, not whether they do ETG in the sense of taking high-paying jobs primarily in order to donate.)
Tom, there is potential for effective altruism to expand in multiple ways.
It could grow exponentially in the absolute number of people who join the movement and pursue the most effective careers they can.
It could grow exponetially in terms of money moved to effective charities, e.g., by Good Ventures, the amount of influence it wields, or the amount of projects it’s responsible for initiating.
It’s possible there will be a great increase in the number of effective giving opportunities to existing or yet unfounded organizations and projects. Or, only the amount of money moved to existing effective charities might substantially increase, creating or exacerbating funding constraints. Or, both. How would your ideal distribution of EtG relative to other EA work change under such scenarios?
Changes like that would absolutely change my ideal distribution, in the ways that you’d predict. :) I’m just sceptical that some of them will in fact happen—e.g. that we’ll develop many GiveWell-beating donation targets, able to absorb a lot of money before capping out. I’m one of the people who Peter mentioned as favouring direct poverty relief—and there are an awful lot of poor people out there.
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.
As you know, I endorse your position, and think that in the ideal distribution—the one in which all of those not earning to give are doing the most valuable things—even more than 80% of people would be ETG. (More precisely, they’d be doing good primarily by donating, as this is the real issue here, not whether they do ETG in the sense of taking high-paying jobs primarily in order to donate.)
Tom, there is potential for effective altruism to expand in multiple ways.
It could grow exponentially in the absolute number of people who join the movement and pursue the most effective careers they can.
It could grow exponetially in terms of money moved to effective charities, e.g., by Good Ventures, the amount of influence it wields, or the amount of projects it’s responsible for initiating.
It’s possible there will be a great increase in the number of effective giving opportunities to existing or yet unfounded organizations and projects. Or, only the amount of money moved to existing effective charities might substantially increase, creating or exacerbating funding constraints. Or, both. How would your ideal distribution of EtG relative to other EA work change under such scenarios?
Changes like that would absolutely change my ideal distribution, in the ways that you’d predict. :) I’m just sceptical that some of them will in fact happen—e.g. that we’ll develop many GiveWell-beating donation targets, able to absorb a lot of money before capping out. I’m one of the people who Peter mentioned as favouring direct poverty relief—and there are an awful lot of poor people out there.
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.