The main thing with scaling Earning to Give is eventually you have give up on any clear definition of “effective.” Part of the appeal of early-days Earn to Give was it was so simple. Make money. Give 10%. Choose from one of this relatively short list of charities.
My sense is that the “well vetted” charities can only handle a few hundred million a year, and the “weird plausibly good unvetted charities that easily fit into any EA frameworks” also only can handle a few hundred million a year, and then after that… I dunno you’re back to basically just donating anywhere that seems remotely plausible.
Which… maybe is actually the correct place for EA to go. But it’s important to note that it might go in that direction.
(Relatedly, I used to have some implicit belief that EA was better than the Gates Foundation, but nowadays, apart from EA taking X-risk and a few other weird beliefs seriously, EA seems to do basically the same things the Gates Foundation does, and the Gates Foundation is just what it looks like when you scale up by a factor of 10)
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)
The main thing with scaling Earning to Give is eventually you have give up on any clear definition of “effective.” Part of the appeal of early-days Earn to Give was it was so simple. Make money. Give 10%. Choose from one of this relatively short list of charities.
My sense is that the “well vetted” charities can only handle a few hundred million a year, and the “weird plausibly good unvetted charities that easily fit into any EA frameworks” also only can handle a few hundred million a year, and then after that… I dunno you’re back to basically just donating anywhere that seems remotely plausible.
Which… maybe is actually the correct place for EA to go. But it’s important to note that it might go in that direction.
(Relatedly, I used to have some implicit belief that EA was better than the Gates Foundation, but nowadays, apart from EA taking X-risk and a few other weird beliefs seriously, EA seems to do basically the same things the Gates Foundation does, and the Gates Foundation is just what it looks like when you scale up by a factor of 10)
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)