The question of to what extent more effective altruists should return to earning to give during the last year as the value of companies like Meta and FTX has declined has me pondering whether that’s worthwhile, given how nobody in EA seems to know how to spend well way more money per year on multiple EA causes.
I’ve been meaning to write a post about how there has been a lot of mixed messaging about what to do about AI alignment. There has been an increased urgency to onboard new talent, and launch and expand projects, yet there is an apparently growing consensus that almost everything everyone is doing is either pointless or making things worse. Setbacks the clean meat industry faces have been mounting during the last couple years. There aren’t clear or obvious ways to make significant progress on overcoming those setbacks mainly by throwing more money at them in some way.
I’m not as familiar with how much room for more funding before diminishing marginal returns are hit for other priority areas for EA. I expect that other than a few clear-cut cases like maybe some of Givewell’s top recommended charities, there isn’t a strong sense of how to spend well more money per year than a lot of causes are already receiving from the EA community.
It’s one thing for smaller numbers of people returning to give to know the best targets for increased marginal funding that might fall through after the decline of FTX. It seems like it might be shortsighted to send droves of people rushing back into earning to give when there wouldn’t be any consensus for what interventions they should earning to give to.
The question of to what extent more effective altruists should return to earning to give during the last year as the value of companies like Meta and FTX has declined has me pondering whether that’s worthwhile, given how nobody in EA seems to know how to spend well way more money per year on multiple EA causes.
I’ve been meaning to write a post about how there has been a lot of mixed messaging about what to do about AI alignment. There has been an increased urgency to onboard new talent, and launch and expand projects, yet there is an apparently growing consensus that almost everything everyone is doing is either pointless or making things worse. Setbacks the clean meat industry faces have been mounting during the last couple years. There aren’t clear or obvious ways to make significant progress on overcoming those setbacks mainly by throwing more money at them in some way.
I’m not as familiar with how much room for more funding before diminishing marginal returns are hit for other priority areas for EA. I expect that other than a few clear-cut cases like maybe some of Givewell’s top recommended charities, there isn’t a strong sense of how to spend well more money per year than a lot of causes are already receiving from the EA community.
It’s one thing for smaller numbers of people returning to give to know the best targets for increased marginal funding that might fall through after the decline of FTX. It seems like it might be shortsighted to send droves of people rushing back into earning to give when there wouldn’t be any consensus for what interventions they should earning to give to.