As a whole, I think effective altruism is currently more structurally bottlenecked and network bottlenecked than funding bottlenecked. Improving the structural and networking constrains is higher leverage than adding more money to the system (on average). Which is not say increasing funding is not valuable. I would expect this to depend a lot on individual circumstances.
If you look on the funding bottlenecks, they seem to be mostly the result of the structure of the funding, that of aggregate sum: imagine a counterfactual world in which OpenPhil has $1b more than it has. How much more effective actions you would expect to see in the world?
So also in funding, we need more structures. EtG is highly impactful as far as the giving is smart, with money directed toward alleviating the structural constrains of funding. I don’t think this scales “endlessly”.
Another point is, from a global perspective, EtG makes more sense in some places than others. For example, a philosophy postdoc in Prague can earn as little as £1100/m. Should such a person drop an academic career, and do EtG? Almost certainly not. What about EAs in India? They have likely very different comparative advantages than EtG.
I think the framework of “try to figure out what EA most needs and do that” could be helpful, but can go wrong if over-applied. Personal fit is important. Comparative advantage is important. Spreading out talent is important too. If our movement was 100% ETG, that would be really bad. But if you’re some EA person and you’re having trouble figuring out what to do and can’t get an EA job or enter into some flashy academic field, doing ETG is a lot better than just feeling dejected. But right now the message I hear from EA has not always been in line with that.
I think Jan’s point actually solves the problem of people resorting to EtG because they feel dejected. I assume these people are bright, talented and have a lot to contribute (implied from the recent EA jobs post). This method is encouraging people to contribute to fields they are interested in in perhaps more unorthodox ways which have important effects on the movement: preventing drift, allowing for innovation (I favor any structure which encourages startup-like activity, especially in an org like EA where there is a good track record to follow through, develop and work collaboratively), creating a more thoughtful and well-informed community and allowing for more experiential/experimental learning and exposure to someone’s Cause X. These effects are, unfortunately, fuzzy and hard to measure, but ultimately I think which have a lot of really important effects on the movement - someone who is risk averse and concerned with the value of their efforts paths could pair this with another strategy like EtG. I think we should consider different types of jobs/ways to make impact as percentages—you may begin your career spending 10% of your resources (time, energy, money) on EtG, 70% on skills-building (getting a PhD, working) and 20% participation in movement building, 10 years later you might change to 30% EtG, 40% volunteering for a Cause X project and 30% movement building.
Agree this is scalable, as long as people aren’t purely trying to maximize income/giving capacity which I don’t think is sustainable. (I’ve done quantitative finance while passionate about that work, and I’ve done it when I wasn’t passionate about it; the former is WAY easier). I’d love to see more early career EAs pursue work that they’re interested in and donate effectively while building skills, networks, etc.
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)
“Earning to give” feels like a pretty endlessly scalable use of people. What do you think?
As a whole, I think effective altruism is currently more structurally bottlenecked and network bottlenecked than funding bottlenecked. Improving the structural and networking constrains is higher leverage than adding more money to the system (on average). Which is not say increasing funding is not valuable. I would expect this to depend a lot on individual circumstances.
If you look on the funding bottlenecks, they seem to be mostly the result of the structure of the funding, that of aggregate sum: imagine a counterfactual world in which OpenPhil has $1b more than it has. How much more effective actions you would expect to see in the world?
So also in funding, we need more structures. EtG is highly impactful as far as the giving is smart, with money directed toward alleviating the structural constrains of funding. I don’t think this scales “endlessly”.
Another point is, from a global perspective, EtG makes more sense in some places than others. For example, a philosophy postdoc in Prague can earn as little as £1100/m. Should such a person drop an academic career, and do EtG? Almost certainly not. What about EAs in India? They have likely very different comparative advantages than EtG.
I think the framework of “try to figure out what EA most needs and do that” could be helpful, but can go wrong if over-applied. Personal fit is important. Comparative advantage is important. Spreading out talent is important too. If our movement was 100% ETG, that would be really bad. But if you’re some EA person and you’re having trouble figuring out what to do and can’t get an EA job or enter into some flashy academic field, doing ETG is a lot better than just feeling dejected. But right now the message I hear from EA has not always been in line with that.
I think Jan’s point actually solves the problem of people resorting to EtG because they feel dejected. I assume these people are bright, talented and have a lot to contribute (implied from the recent EA jobs post). This method is encouraging people to contribute to fields they are interested in in perhaps more unorthodox ways which have important effects on the movement: preventing drift, allowing for innovation (I favor any structure which encourages startup-like activity, especially in an org like EA where there is a good track record to follow through, develop and work collaboratively), creating a more thoughtful and well-informed community and allowing for more experiential/experimental learning and exposure to someone’s Cause X. These effects are, unfortunately, fuzzy and hard to measure, but ultimately I think which have a lot of really important effects on the movement - someone who is risk averse and concerned with the value of their efforts paths could pair this with another strategy like EtG. I think we should consider different types of jobs/ways to make impact as percentages—you may begin your career spending 10% of your resources (time, energy, money) on EtG, 70% on skills-building (getting a PhD, working) and 20% participation in movement building, 10 years later you might change to 30% EtG, 40% volunteering for a Cause X project and 30% movement building.
Agree this is scalable, as long as people aren’t purely trying to maximize income/giving capacity which I don’t think is sustainable. (I’ve done quantitative finance while passionate about that work, and I’ve done it when I wasn’t passionate about it; the former is WAY easier). I’d love to see more early career EAs pursue work that they’re interested in and donate effectively while building skills, networks, etc.
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)