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)
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)