Our best guess is that benefits grow slightly superlinearly because of coordination benefits (but you can easily remove coordination benefits from the model).
A naïve first-order approximation is that benefits (not accounting for reputational issues) are linear in the size of the group.
If everyone in EA donated a constant amount of money, then getting more people into EA would linearly increase the amount of money being donated (which, for simplicity, we can say is a linear increase in impact)
Is linear a good approximation here? Conventional wisdom suggests decreasing marginal returns to additional funding and people, because we’ll try to prioritize the best opportunities.
I can see this being tricky, though. Of course doubling the community size all at once would hit capacities for hiring, management, similarly good projects, and room for more funding generally, but EA community growth isn’t usually abrupt like this (FTX funding aside).
In the animal space, I could imagine that doing a lot of corporate chicken (hen and broiler) welfare work first is/was important for potentially much bigger wins like:
legislation/policy change, due less corporate pushback or even corporate support, and stronger org reputations
getting the biggest and worst companies like McDonalds to commit to welfare reforms,
moving onto less relatable animals exploited in larger numbers we can potentially help much more cost-effectively going forward, like fish, shrimp and insects.
But I also imagine that marginal corporate campaigns are less cost-effective when considering only the effects on the targeted companies and animals they use, because of the targets are prioritized and resources spent on a given campaign will have decreasing marginal returns in expectation.
GiveWell charities tend to have a lot of room for funding at given cost-effectiveness bars, so linear is probably close enough, unless it’s easy to get more billionaires.
For research, the most promising projects will tend to be prioritized first, too, but with more funding and a more established reputation, you can attract people who are better fits, and can do those projects better, do projects you couldn’t do without them, or identify better projects, and possibly managers who can handle more reports.
Maybe there’s some good writing on this topic elsewhere?
My impression is that, while corporate spinoffs are common, mergers are also common, and it seems fairly normal for investors to believe that corporations substantially larger than EA are more valuable as a single entity than as independent pieces, giving some evidence for superlinear returns.
But my guess is that this is extremely contingent on specific facts about how the corporation is structured, and it’s unclear to me whether EA has this kind of structure. I too would be interested in research on when you can expect increasing versus decreasing marginal returns.
Thanks for writing this! This is a cool model.
Is linear a good approximation here? Conventional wisdom suggests decreasing marginal returns to additional funding and people, because we’ll try to prioritize the best opportunities.
I can see this being tricky, though. Of course doubling the community size all at once would hit capacities for hiring, management, similarly good projects, and room for more funding generally, but EA community growth isn’t usually abrupt like this (FTX funding aside).
In the animal space, I could imagine that doing a lot of corporate chicken (hen and broiler) welfare work first is/was important for potentially much bigger wins like:
legislation/policy change, due less corporate pushback or even corporate support, and stronger org reputations
getting the biggest and worst companies like McDonalds to commit to welfare reforms,
moving onto less relatable animals exploited in larger numbers we can potentially help much more cost-effectively going forward, like fish, shrimp and insects.
But I also imagine that marginal corporate campaigns are less cost-effective when considering only the effects on the targeted companies and animals they use, because of the targets are prioritized and resources spent on a given campaign will have decreasing marginal returns in expectation.
GiveWell charities tend to have a lot of room for funding at given cost-effectiveness bars, so linear is probably close enough, unless it’s easy to get more billionaires.
For research, the most promising projects will tend to be prioritized first, too, but with more funding and a more established reputation, you can attract people who are better fits, and can do those projects better, do projects you couldn’t do without them, or identify better projects, and possibly managers who can handle more reports.
Maybe there’s some good writing on this topic elsewhere?
My impression is that, while corporate spinoffs are common, mergers are also common, and it seems fairly normal for investors to believe that corporations substantially larger than EA are more valuable as a single entity than as independent pieces, giving some evidence for superlinear returns.
But my guess is that this is extremely contingent on specific facts about how the corporation is structured, and it’s unclear to me whether EA has this kind of structure. I too would be interested in research on when you can expect increasing versus decreasing marginal returns.