What is meant by “not my problem”? My understanding is that what is meant is “what I care about is no better off if I worry about this thing than if I don’t.” Hence the analogy to salary; if all I care about is $$, then getting paid in Facebook stock means that my utility is the same if I worry about the value of Google stock or if I don’t.
It sounds like you’re saying that, if I’m working at org A but getting paid in impact certificates from org B, the actual value of org A impact certificates is “not my problem” in this sense. Here obviously I care about things other than $$.
This doesn’t seem right at all to me, given the current state of the world. Worrying about whether my org is impactful is my problem in that it might indeed affect things I care about, for example because I might go work somewhere else.
Thinking about this more, I recalled the strength of the assumption that, in this world, everyone agrees to maximize impact certificates *instead of* counterfactual impact. This seems like it just obliterates all of my objections, which are arguments based on counterfactual impact. They become arguments at the wrong level. If the market is not robust, that means more certificates for me *which is definitionally good*.
So this is an argument that if everyone collectively agrees to change their incentives, we’d get more counterfactual impact in the long run. I think my main objection is not about this as an end state — not that I’m sure I agree with that, I just haven’t thought about it much in isolation — but about the feasibility of taking that kind of collective action, and about issues that may arise if some people do it unilaterally.
What is meant by “not my problem”? My understanding is that what is meant is “what I care about is no better off if I worry about this thing than if I don’t.” Hence the analogy to salary; if all I care about is $$, then getting paid in Facebook stock means that my utility is the same if I worry about the value of Google stock or if I don’t.
It sounds like you’re saying that, if I’m working at org A but getting paid in impact certificates from org B, the actual value of org A impact certificates is “not my problem” in this sense. Here obviously I care about things other than $$.
This doesn’t seem right at all to me, given the current state of the world. Worrying about whether my org is impactful is my problem in that it might indeed affect things I care about, for example because I might go work somewhere else.
Thinking about this more, I recalled the strength of the assumption that, in this world, everyone agrees to maximize impact certificates *instead of* counterfactual impact. This seems like it just obliterates all of my objections, which are arguments based on counterfactual impact. They become arguments at the wrong level. If the market is not robust, that means more certificates for me *which is definitionally good*.
So this is an argument that if everyone collectively agrees to change their incentives, we’d get more counterfactual impact in the long run. I think my main objection is not about this as an end state — not that I’m sure I agree with that, I just haven’t thought about it much in isolation — but about the feasibility of taking that kind of collective action, and about issues that may arise if some people do it unilaterally.