Completely agree with this and have been thinking about mechanisms for doing this lately.
I think there are high context and low context services. A low context service doesn’t require knowledge of EA to perform, high context does.
Services that are low-context (i.e. doesn’t require knowledge of EA to perform) should be selected based on quality & price. There’s no reason to prefer that a member of EA is making money as a web developer (as opposed to any other provider) unless you believe you’re getting more than what you pay for based on their membership to the community.
Services that are high-context there’s amore nuanced case: there might be a lot of benefits to having more people trained up in that domain specific skill. Essentially, there are positive externalities to having this funded. But, I still believe the signal of how much orgs are willing to pay is very important.
An idea about cost effectiveness evaluation for services: “Primary industry” organisations can approximately model cost effectiveness in terms of their main output: $ per life saved, $ per career change etc. When somebody charges for their services, it requires the primary orgs to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of that service. How many more lives saved if this operational system cost less to run? If we had a better website?
I imagine there could be a way of capturing that trade-off and having service providers estimate their impact through the prices organisations are willing to pay.
Services that are low-context (i.e. doesn’t require knowledge of EA to perform) should be selected based on quality & price. There’s no reason to prefer that a member of EA is making money as a web developer (as opposed to any other provider) unless you believe you’re getting more than what you pay for based on their membership to the community.
All else equal, I think transferring money to EAs rather than non-EAs will transfer some money to effective charities. I don’t think this is a large effect, but e.g. it could be 10% of my fee if they’re a GWWC pledger, so perhaps I should discount prices offered by pledgers by around 10% before comparing them to other prices.
(In fact, I probably value moving resources to EA-motivated people more than just what they subsequently donate, but the more indirect the model of impact, the less I think it’s worth analysing in detail.)
Completely agree with this and have been thinking about mechanisms for doing this lately.
I think there are high context and low context services. A low context service doesn’t require knowledge of EA to perform, high context does.
Services that are low-context (i.e. doesn’t require knowledge of EA to perform) should be selected based on quality & price. There’s no reason to prefer that a member of EA is making money as a web developer (as opposed to any other provider) unless you believe you’re getting more than what you pay for based on their membership to the community.
Services that are high-context there’s amore nuanced case: there might be a lot of benefits to having more people trained up in that domain specific skill. Essentially, there are positive externalities to having this funded. But, I still believe the signal of how much orgs are willing to pay is very important.
An idea about cost effectiveness evaluation for services: “Primary industry” organisations can approximately model cost effectiveness in terms of their main output: $ per life saved, $ per career change etc. When somebody charges for their services, it requires the primary orgs to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of that service. How many more lives saved if this operational system cost less to run? If we had a better website?
I imagine there could be a way of capturing that trade-off and having service providers estimate their impact through the prices organisations are willing to pay.
All else equal, I think transferring money to EAs rather than non-EAs will transfer some money to effective charities. I don’t think this is a large effect, but e.g. it could be 10% of my fee if they’re a GWWC pledger, so perhaps I should discount prices offered by pledgers by around 10% before comparing them to other prices.
(In fact, I probably value moving resources to EA-motivated people more than just what they subsequently donate, but the more indirect the model of impact, the less I think it’s worth analysing in detail.)