In the case of ALLFED, this is based on my picturing of one employee going about its month, and asking myself how surprising it would be if they couldn’t produce 10 mQARPS of value per month, or how surprising it would be if they could produce 50 mQARPs per month. In the case of the AI safety organizations, this is based on estimating the value of each of the papers that Larks things are valuable enough to mention, and then estimating what fraction of the total value of an organization those are.
Private info
a) Building up researchers into more capable researchers, knowledge acquired that isn’t published, information value of trying out dead ends, acquiring prestige, etc. b) I actually didn’t estimate ALLFED’s impact, I estimated the impact of the marginal hires, per 1.
Personal taste, it’s possible that was the inferior choice. I found it more easy to picture the dollars moved than the improvement in productivity. In hindsight, maybe improving retention would be another main benefit which I didn’t consider.
I got that as a comment. The intuition here is that it would be really, really hard to find a project which moves as much money as Giving Tuesday and which you could do every day, every week, or every month. But if there are more than 52 local EA groups, an EAGx could be organized every week. If you think that EA is only doing projects at maximum efficiency (which it isn’t), and knowing only that Giving Tuesdays are done once a year and EAGx are done more often, I’d expect one EAGx to be less valuable than one Giving Tuesday.
Or, in other words, I’d expect there to be some tradeoff between quality and scalable.
I actually didn’t estimate ALLFED’s impact, I estimated the impact of the marginal hires, per 1.
So did that estimate of the impact of marginal hires also account for how much those hires would contribute to “Building up researchers [themselves or others] into more capable researchers, knowledge acquired that isn’t published, information value of trying out dead ends, acquiring prestige”?
In the case of ALLFED, this is based on my picturing of one employee going about its month, and asking myself how surprising it would be if they couldn’t produce 10 mQARPS of value per month, or how surprising it would be if they could produce 50 mQARPs per month. In the case of the AI safety organizations, this is based on estimating the value of each of the papers that Larks things are valuable enough to mention, and then estimating what fraction of the total value of an organization those are.
Private info
a) Building up researchers into more capable researchers, knowledge acquired that isn’t published, information value of trying out dead ends, acquiring prestige, etc. b) I actually didn’t estimate ALLFED’s impact, I estimated the impact of the marginal hires, per 1.
Personal taste, it’s possible that was the inferior choice. I found it more easy to picture the dollars moved than the improvement in productivity. In hindsight, maybe improving retention would be another main benefit which I didn’t consider.
I got that as a comment. The intuition here is that it would be really, really hard to find a project which moves as much money as Giving Tuesday and which you could do every day, every week, or every month. But if there are more than 52 local EA groups, an EAGx could be organized every week. If you think that EA is only doing projects at maximum efficiency (which it isn’t), and knowing only that Giving Tuesdays are done once a year and EAGx are done more often, I’d expect one EAGx to be less valuable than one Giving Tuesday.
Or, in other words, I’d expect there to be some tradeoff between quality and scalable.
Thanks for the clarifications :)
So did that estimate of the impact of marginal hires also account for how much those hires would contribute to “Building up researchers [themselves or others] into more capable researchers, knowledge acquired that isn’t published, information value of trying out dead ends, acquiring prestige”?
Oof, no it didn’t, good point.