EDIT: I see that CarlShulman brought up essentially the same points, which I somehow managed to miss while posting this. I’ve left up the original comment for posterity but feel free to ignore.
a worker has more capacity than a donor does to learn whether small probability failure modes prevail in practice, and can switch to a different job if he or she finds that such a failure mode prevails.
I have some questions about this.
First, at least for the example small-probability failure modes that you gave as an example in your previous article, an individual worker would not be in a much better position to assess them than a donor (or at least, would be in no better position to assess them than a donor’s inputs, like GiveWell or other third parties). Can you give some examples where workers would be in a better position?
Second, donors seem to be in a much better position than workers to react to failure. If you’re doing something that hasn’t been done before—which seems to be the place where direct work is most obviously better than earning to give—then you need to spend a lot of time figuring out things that nobody else has figured out yet. This means that the costs of switching to a different cause are quite high. On the other hand, a donor can simply change their beneficiary organization, which is much easier.
I thought that my response to Carl addressed your second question rather than your first, and was planning to try to address your first. If you’d like more thoughts on the first question I can give them, though I think that my reasoning on this point can be inferred from a close reading of and reflection on my recent blog posts.
I’d be happy to correspond about these things: feel free to email me at jsinick (at) gmail (dot) com
EDIT: I see that CarlShulman brought up essentially the same points, which I somehow managed to miss while posting this. I’ve left up the original comment for posterity but feel free to ignore.
I have some questions about this.
First, at least for the example small-probability failure modes that you gave as an example in your previous article, an individual worker would not be in a much better position to assess them than a donor (or at least, would be in no better position to assess them than a donor’s inputs, like GiveWell or other third parties). Can you give some examples where workers would be in a better position?
Second, donors seem to be in a much better position than workers to react to failure. If you’re doing something that hasn’t been done before—which seems to be the place where direct work is most obviously better than earning to give—then you need to spend a lot of time figuring out things that nobody else has figured out yet. This means that the costs of switching to a different cause are quite high. On the other hand, a donor can simply change their beneficiary organization, which is much easier.
I thought that my response to Carl addressed your second question rather than your first, and was planning to try to address your first. If you’d like more thoughts on the first question I can give them, though I think that my reasoning on this point can be inferred from a close reading of and reflection on my recent blog posts.
I’d be happy to correspond about these things: feel free to email me at jsinick (at) gmail (dot) com