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.
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.