Building off of Jason’s comment: Another way to express this is that comparing directly to the $5,500 Givewell bar is only fair for risk-neutral donors (I think?). Most potential donors are not really risk neutral, and would rather spend $5,001 to definitely save one life than $5,000 to have a 10% chance of saving 10 lives. Risk neutrality is a totally defensible position, but so is non-neutrality. It’s good to have the option of paying a “premium” for a higher confidence (but lower risk-neutral EV).
Leaving math mode...I love this post. It made me emotional and also made me think, and it feels like a really central example of what EA should be about. I’m very impressed by your resolve here in following through with this plan, and I’m really glad to have people like you in this community.
Thanks so much for the encouragment, really do appreciate it.
Great point I hadn’t thought about risk neutrality vs non-neutrality here and that there might be a pool of people even within EA who would rather pay a “premium” for higher confidence. Outside EA my experience has been that perhaps even the majority of people would probably prefer to pay for higher confidence.
I agree with your last sentence, and I think in some versions of this it’s the vast majority of people. A lot of charity advertising seems to encourage a false sense of confidence, e.g. “Feed this child for $1,” or “adopt this manatee”. I think this makes use of a near-universal human bias which probably has a name but which I am not recalling at the moment. For a less deceptive version of this, note how much effort AMF and GiveDirectly seem to have put in into tracking the concrete impact of your specific donation.
Orthogonally, I think most people are willing to pay more for a more legible/direct theory of impact.
“I give $2800, this kid has lifesaving heart surgery” is certainly more legible and direct than a GiveWell-type charity. In the former case, the donor doesn’t have to trust GiveWell’s methodologies, data gathering abilities, and freedom from bias. I’ve invested a significant amount of time and thought into getting to my current high level of confidence in GiveWell’s analyses, more time than most people are prepared to spend thinking about their charitable donations.
And I think most people—including myself—have a prior that projections and analyses of all sorts tend to be overinflated in comparison to reality. How many building projects come in on time and under budget? How many IT projects? The less complex the theory of impact, the less the lightly-researching donor will end up implicitly discounting the organization’s claims on account of their background skepticism of projections and analyses.
Building off of Jason’s comment: Another way to express this is that comparing directly to the $5,500 Givewell bar is only fair for risk-neutral donors (I think?). Most potential donors are not really risk neutral, and would rather spend $5,001 to definitely save one life than $5,000 to have a 10% chance of saving 10 lives. Risk neutrality is a totally defensible position, but so is non-neutrality. It’s good to have the option of paying a “premium” for a higher confidence (but lower risk-neutral EV).
Leaving math mode...I love this post. It made me emotional and also made me think, and it feels like a really central example of what EA should be about. I’m very impressed by your resolve here in following through with this plan, and I’m really glad to have people like you in this community.
Thanks so much for the encouragment, really do appreciate it.
Great point I hadn’t thought about risk neutrality vs non-neutrality here and that there might be a pool of people even within EA who would rather pay a “premium” for higher confidence. Outside EA my experience has been that perhaps even the majority of people would probably prefer to pay for higher confidence.
I agree with your last sentence, and I think in some versions of this it’s the vast majority of people. A lot of charity advertising seems to encourage a false sense of confidence, e.g. “Feed this child for $1,” or “adopt this manatee”. I think this makes use of a near-universal human bias which probably has a name but which I am not recalling at the moment. For a less deceptive version of this, note how much effort AMF and GiveDirectly seem to have put in into tracking the concrete impact of your specific donation.
Orthogonally, I think most people are willing to pay more for a more legible/direct theory of impact.
“I give $2800, this kid has lifesaving heart surgery” is certainly more legible and direct than a GiveWell-type charity. In the former case, the donor doesn’t have to trust GiveWell’s methodologies, data gathering abilities, and freedom from bias. I’ve invested a significant amount of time and thought into getting to my current high level of confidence in GiveWell’s analyses, more time than most people are prepared to spend thinking about their charitable donations.
And I think most people—including myself—have a prior that projections and analyses of all sorts tend to be overinflated in comparison to reality. How many building projects come in on time and under budget? How many IT projects? The less complex the theory of impact, the less the lightly-researching donor will end up implicitly discounting the organization’s claims on account of their background skepticism of projections and analyses.