Fair point! Perhaps a more modest standard would be appropriate—i.e., “giving that produces a net positive effect in the world, something more than 1x.”
If the bar is set so high, then obviously there will be almost nothing worth funding except for a miniscule set of interventions on a miniscule number of issues, and large foundations will be left with piles of money that they don’t know what to do with, and meanwhile the world still has lots of problems that need solving even if there’s no 10X intervention in sight.
I don’t think we were advocating leaving money on the sidelines for that reason—patient philanthropy is largely a different argument.
I think that we buy down the 10x interventions, then the 9x, 8x, etc. But even if they are not known, discovering those interventions may possible without the same level of investment in RCTs.
Fair point! Perhaps a more modest standard would be appropriate—i.e., “giving that produces a net positive effect in the world, something more than 1x.”
If the bar is set so high, then obviously there will be almost nothing worth funding except for a miniscule set of interventions on a miniscule number of issues, and large foundations will be left with piles of money that they don’t know what to do with, and meanwhile the world still has lots of problems that need solving even if there’s no 10X intervention in sight.
I don’t think we were advocating leaving money on the sidelines for that reason—patient philanthropy is largely a different argument.
I think that we buy down the 10x interventions, then the 9x, 8x, etc. But even if they are not known, discovering those interventions may possible without the same level of investment in RCTs.