I want to ‘second’ some key points you made (which I was going to make myself). The main theme is that these ‘absolute’ thresholds are not absolute; these are simplified expressions of the true optimization problem.
The real thresholds will be adjusted in light of available funding, opportunities, and beliefsabout future funding.
See comments (mine and others) on the misconception of ‘room for more funding’… the “RFMF” idea must be, either an approximate relative judgment (‘past this funding, we think other opportunities may be better’) or short-term capacity constraint (‘we only have staff/permits/supplies to administer 100k vaccines per year, so we’d need to do more hiring and sourcing to go above this’.)
Diminishing returns … but not to zero
The arguments in your post seem to imply that additional funding has near zero value. My prior is that more money means more impact, but at a diminishing rate.
It’s true that it’s not easy to beat Open Phil in terms of effectiveness, but this line of reasoning seems to imply that Open Phil is able to drive cost-effectiveness to negligible levels in all causes of interest. Actually Open Phil is able to fund everything above a certain bar, and additional small donations have a cost-effectiveness similar to that bar.
The bar moves
What actually happens is that as more funding comes in, Open Phil (& other donors) slightly reduces its bar, so that the total donated is higher, and cost-effectiveness a little lower. (Which might take several years.)
I want to ‘second’ some key points you made (which I was going to make myself). The main theme is that these ‘absolute’ thresholds are not absolute; these are simplified expressions of the true optimization problem.
The real thresholds will be adjusted in light of available funding, opportunities, and beliefsabout future funding.
See comments (mine and others) on the misconception of ‘room for more funding’… the “RFMF” idea must be, either an approximate relative judgment (‘past this funding, we think other opportunities may be better’) or short-term capacity constraint (‘we only have staff/permits/supplies to administer 100k vaccines per year, so we’d need to do more hiring and sourcing to go above this’.)
Diminishing returns … but not to zero
The bar moves