I don’t think global health is no longer neglected. However, I’m no longer fully confident that donating to GiveWell is the most effective way to support human welfare, due to (very positive) infrastructure shifts where the most effective charities in this space get some sort of institutional backstop.
While I acknowledge that it is not actually literally a 1:1 substitution, I think it’s reasonable to model this as a bit of a handicap[1] on effectiveness when I donate to the EA endorsed charities.
Further, GiveWell’s current 8x baseline does not seem to me to be that high of a bar, and I suspect there are many more charities and interventions that are neglected by EAs and are possibly more useful for me to fund as they have no institutional backstops.
When I combine these facts, it seems to me like there’s a reasonable chance that… the same way that EA treated the rest of the philanthropic landscape “adversarially” when thinking about what to fund and avoided the overcrowded areas, perhaps it might make sense for at least a small contingent of people to start treating EA “adversarially” in the same way.
I don’t know what the size of this handicap is, I was roughly modelling it as 0.5xing my donation, but the other comments provide some evidence that it’s much smaller than I think it is. But I’m still not entirely sure and there isn’t good information on this. One thing I would like to do is to figure out what this actual number is.
I don’t think global health is no longer neglected. However, I’m no longer fully confident that donating to GiveWell is the most effective way to support human welfare, due to (very positive) infrastructure shifts where the most effective charities in this space get some sort of institutional backstop.
While I acknowledge that it is not actually literally a 1:1 substitution, I think it’s reasonable to model this as a bit of a handicap[1] on effectiveness when I donate to the EA endorsed charities.
Further, GiveWell’s current 8x baseline does not seem to me to be that high of a bar, and I suspect there are many more charities and interventions that are neglected by EAs and are possibly more useful for me to fund as they have no institutional backstops.
When I combine these facts, it seems to me like there’s a reasonable chance that… the same way that EA treated the rest of the philanthropic landscape “adversarially” when thinking about what to fund and avoided the overcrowded areas, perhaps it might make sense for at least a small contingent of people to start treating EA “adversarially” in the same way.
Does that make sense?
I don’t know what the size of this handicap is, I was roughly modelling it as 0.5xing my donation, but the other comments provide some evidence that it’s much smaller than I think it is. But I’m still not entirely sure and there isn’t good information on this. One thing I would like to do is to figure out what this actual number is.