I was encouraged by the positive response to my posts: it turned out that many people found them helpful! But that also raised the question: why isn’t anyone else doing this? In a community of people who care a ton about the most effective ways to donate money, why wasn’t anyone else set up to make similarly detailed cost-effectiveness analyses?
A sort of central paradox of EA as a movement/community is “you’d think, writing up cost-benefit analysis of donation targets would be like a core community activity”, but, also, there’s big professional orgs evaluating all the charities, and also the a lot of charities feel very fuzzy / difficult to evaluate.
I think it’d be cool if “attempt to make a BOTEC calculation evaluating donation targets” was like the sort of thing people did at EA meetups on-the-regular. (seems more grounding than “spend most of the time recruiting more people to EA”).
A sort of central paradox of EA as a movement/community is “you’d think, writing up cost-benefit analysis of donation targets would be like a core community activity”, but, also, there’s big professional orgs evaluating all the charities, and also the a lot of charities feel very fuzzy / difficult to evaluate.
I think it’d be cool if “attempt to make a BOTEC calculation evaluating donation targets” was like the sort of thing people did at EA meetups on-the-regular. (seems more grounding than “spend most of the time recruiting more people to EA”).