Imagine chewing gum is an unbelievably effective cause: it’s life-saving impact is many orders of magnitude higher than walking. If we want to maximise chewing gum to the fullest we cannot have any distractions, not even potential or little ones. Walking has opportunity costs and prevents us from extremely super effective gum chewing.
This piece is about how those resources can be collectively deployed most effectively, which is a different question from “how can I do the most good.”
Michael’s post still applies. Collective resources are just a sum of many individuals and everyone/every group contemplating their marginal impact ideally includes other EAs’ work in their considerations. The opportunity cost bit applies both to individuals and groups (or the entire movement)
Any unit EA resource spent by x people has opportunity costs.
Yes, I should have phrased these things more clearly.
a) The evidence we currently have in this world suggests that the usual EA causes have an extraordinarily higher impact than other causes. That is the entire reason EA is working on them: because they do the most good per unit time invested.
Indeed there might be even better causes but the most effective way to find them is, well, to look for them in the most efficient way possible which is (cause prioritisation) research. Spreading EA-thinking in other domains doesn’t provide nearly as much data.
b) I just meant that we probably won’t be 100% sure of anything, but I agree that we could find overwhelming evidence for an incredibly high-impact opportunity. Hence the need for cause prioritisation research