On the one hand, I am sympathetic to the differential scrutiny applied to different projects.
On the other hand, there are conceptual models in which this scrutiny makes sense. In one of them, money has been pre-committed by donors ex ante to cause areas. So money in the global health/development (GH/D) bucket (or maybe the neartermism bucket) is only competing for funding against projects in the same bucket (while the HPMOR and Wytham projects were in something like a “longtermism community growth” (LCG) bucket).
As a practical matter, this is approximately true—in the context of an appeal on the Forum for funds, Anthony’s project is very likely to receive funds that would counterfactually have gone to other GH/D work (and there’s a good chance they would have counterfactually gone to GiveWell-style work). In contrast, the odds of someone like me giving money to HP fanfic distribution or Wytham are ~0.
Relatedly, one could see the GH/D and LCG fields as too methodologically different for this kind of comparison to be fitting. There’s a certain appeal to that, since the numbers in LCG cost-effectiveness analyses tend to be much less grounded in data than GH/D numbers. And if you make the “number of future lives potentially saved” high enough, the LCG project will always win even if the “chance of preventing catastrophe” is miniscule indeed. Of course, one extension to this approach would be to argue that (e.g.) EA-style GH/D projects and non-EA-style GH/D projects are also too methodologically different for this kind of analysis—and that would leave us with no common yardstick to evaluate projects in GH/D itself.
On the one hand, I am sympathetic to the differential scrutiny applied to different projects.
On the other hand, there are conceptual models in which this scrutiny makes sense. In one of them, money has been pre-committed by donors ex ante to cause areas. So money in the global health/development (GH/D) bucket (or maybe the neartermism bucket) is only competing for funding against projects in the same bucket (while the HPMOR and Wytham projects were in something like a “longtermism community growth” (LCG) bucket).
As a practical matter, this is approximately true—in the context of an appeal on the Forum for funds, Anthony’s project is very likely to receive funds that would counterfactually have gone to other GH/D work (and there’s a good chance they would have counterfactually gone to GiveWell-style work). In contrast, the odds of someone like me giving money to HP fanfic distribution or Wytham are ~0.
Relatedly, one could see the GH/D and LCG fields as too methodologically different for this kind of comparison to be fitting. There’s a certain appeal to that, since the numbers in LCG cost-effectiveness analyses tend to be much less grounded in data than GH/D numbers. And if you make the “number of future lives potentially saved” high enough, the LCG project will always win even if the “chance of preventing catastrophe” is miniscule indeed. Of course, one extension to this approach would be to argue that (e.g.) EA-style GH/D projects and non-EA-style GH/D projects are also too methodologically different for this kind of analysis—and that would leave us with no common yardstick to evaluate projects in GH/D itself.