Hey fx,
even though I definitely cannot speak on behalf of EA as a whole, I would like to add my 2 cents to this discussion. In my opinion, this sort of question is difficult because it aims at comparing different donation outcomes, that are very hard to compare. (That is a very common problem in EA and I believe that any answer given will be somewhat controversial because of this.) How many years of school attendance generated are equally good to one death prevented? How many times would you have to stub your toe such that the combined pain is more than keeping your hand in boiling water for a second? In a lot of cases, comparing different interventions in Animal Welfare combines mutiple of these “controversial comparison steps”. For example, when comparing the open wing alliance (OWA) and the shrimp welfare project, we need to decide
how much we care about shrimp in comparison to chicken and
how many minutes of living in a battery cage instead of the conditions the OWA managed to achieve are equal to one minute o f slowly suffocating to death as a shrimp.
Rethink Priorities worked a lot on the first problem.
Unfortunately shrimp do not die in a matter of seconds. Their death lasts an average of 20 minutes. Crunching these numbers, MHR comes to the conclusion, that these different interventions are surprisingly close in their effectiveness. Considering just how controversial each intermediate step was to come to this conclusion, I find it quite reasonable that people with slightly different assumptions think, that the shrimp welfare project is much more cost-effective.
I also wanted to use the opportunity to link this post from Benthams Bulldog, which I found quite nice, even though it doesn’t exactly match your question.
Thank you for sharing!
(Simply giving this link was really valuable already. I will put my main takeaway points from this post here, but I do not expect a response in case you do not want to participate in this discussion again as it appears you already did so 3 years ago :’D.)
To me, it appears as if the authors mainly agree that diversification (within one cause area) is motivated by an attempt to maximize utility, though they disagree on the degree to which diminishing returns of investment (and therefore the role of diversification) actually matter in practice. I briefly want to point out that even though this idea is obvious from an EA perspective the literature on donor coordination problems does a very poor job in capturing this intent.
I agree that donation funds help reduce coordination problems. However, assuming there is more than one grantmaker, this just shifts the “burden of aggregating different opinions” from the general public into the organization since grantmakers still need some mechanism to reconcile their differing beliefs. That said, I don’t know enough about typical grantmaking processes to judge whether grantmakers differ significantly enough in their individual assessments for this to matter in practice.