Another podcast episode on a similar topic came out yesterday, from Rabbithole Investigations (hosted by former Current Affairs podcasts hosts Pete Davis, Sparky Abraham, and Dan Thorn). They had Joshua Kissel on to talk about the premises of EA and his paper “Effective Altruism and Anti-Capitalism: An Attempt at Reconciliation.”
This is the first interview (and second episode) in a new series dedicated to the question “Is EA Right?”. The premise of the show is that the hosts are interested laypeople who interview many guests with different perspectives, in the hopes of answering their question by the end of the series.
I’m optimistic about this podcast as another productive bridge between the EA and lefty worlds; their intro episode gave me a lot of hope that they’re approaching this with real curiosity.
(I’m posting this more to recommend / mention the series rather than the particular episode though; the episode itself spent most of its runtime covering intro-EA topics in what I felt was a pretty standard way, which most people here probably don’t need. That said, it did a good job of what it was aiming for, and I’m looking forward to the real heavy-hitting critiques and responses as the series continues.)
There have been a few posts discussing the value of small donations over the past year, notably:
Benjamin Todd on “Despite billions of extra funding, small donors can still have a significant impact”
a counterpoint, AppliedDivinityStudies on “A Red-Team Against the Impact of Small Donations”
a counter-counterpoint, Michael Townsend on “The value of small donations from a longtermist perspective”
There’s a lot of discussion here (especially if you go through the comments of each piece), and so plenty of room to come to different conclusions.
Here’s roughly where I come out of this:
What’s the relevant counterfactual? Many of these comment threads turn into discussions about earning-to-give vs direct work, but if you have $1000 in your hand, ready to donate, that’s not the relevant question. Rather, you should ask, “if I don’t donate this, what would I do with it instead, and how much impact would that have?”
You say “I know that professional grant makers think that last-dollar funding is not cost effective because they aren’t funding more projects, but aren’t out of dollars.” I think this frames the issue incorrectly. It’s not that big funders know that other projects aren’t cost-effective, it’s that they don’t currently have enough projects that clear a certain cost-effectiveness bar. But crucially, that bar is still far above zero!
This means
there are probably many opportunities that are just as cost-effective that they haven’t found (potentially you have information they don’t that you could exploit; see this section of the above ADS post)
marginal donations should have a cost-effectiveness at worst just below that bar, which means you’re only doing a little worse than the big funders. (This point taken from Benjamin Todd here.)