I think we are pretty far from exhausting all the good giving oppurtunities. And even if all the highly effective charities are filled something like Give Directly can be scaled up. It is possible in the future we will eventually get to the point where there are so few people in poverty that cash transfers are ineffective. But if that happens there is nothing to be sad about. the marignal value of donations will go down as more money flows into EA. That is an argument for giving more now. A future where marginal EA donaions are ineffective is a very good future.
Yeah, GiveDirectly feels like the kind of thing that could take hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. If we ever do run out of funding opportunities, which I don’t think we will any time soon, that’s a really good problem to have.
GiveWell also recently announced they are doubling the size of their research team, which will presumably uncover even more giving opportunities that can absorb a lot of funding.
Nod. My comment wasn’t intended to be an argument against, so much as “make sure you understand that this is the world you’re building” (and that, accordingly, you make sure your arguments and language don’t depend on the old world)
The traditional EA mindset is something like “find the charities with the heavy tails on the power law distribution.”
The Agora mindset (Agora was an org I worked at for a bit, that evolved sort of in parallel to EA) was instead “find a way to cut out the bottom 50% on charities and focus on the top 50%”, which at the time I chafed at but I appreciate better now as the sort of thing you automatically deal with when you’re trying to build something that scales.
I do think we’re *already quite close* to the point where that phase transition needs to happen. (I think people who are very thoughtful about their donations can still do much better than “top 50%”, but “be very thoughtful” isn’t a part of the thing that scales easily)
I think we are pretty far from exhausting all the good giving oppurtunities. And even if all the highly effective charities are filled something like Give Directly can be scaled up. It is possible in the future we will eventually get to the point where there are so few people in poverty that cash transfers are ineffective. But if that happens there is nothing to be sad about. the marignal value of donations will go down as more money flows into EA. That is an argument for giving more now. A future where marginal EA donaions are ineffective is a very good future.
Yeah, GiveDirectly feels like the kind of thing that could take hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. If we ever do run out of funding opportunities, which I don’t think we will any time soon, that’s a really good problem to have.
GiveWell also recently announced they are doubling the size of their research team, which will presumably uncover even more giving opportunities that can absorb a lot of funding.
Nod. My comment wasn’t intended to be an argument against, so much as “make sure you understand that this is the world you’re building” (and that, accordingly, you make sure your arguments and language don’t depend on the old world)
The traditional EA mindset is something like “find the charities with the heavy tails on the power law distribution.”
The Agora mindset (Agora was an org I worked at for a bit, that evolved sort of in parallel to EA) was instead “find a way to cut out the bottom 50% on charities and focus on the top 50%”, which at the time I chafed at but I appreciate better now as the sort of thing you automatically deal with when you’re trying to build something that scales.
I do think we’re *already quite close* to the point where that phase transition needs to happen. (I think people who are very thoughtful about their donations can still do much better than “top 50%”, but “be very thoughtful” isn’t a part of the thing that scales easily)