Diminishing returns. Giving $100M to a $10M problem because of information lag doesn’t actually allocate money nearly as efficiently as you might hope.
Do we have any evidence about the severity of that information lag? I can’t imagine it would be much more than a year.
I don’t know if this is a legitimatize concern. It may very well be worth a little waste value from info-lag for the benefit of overall efficiency.
Are we talking about lag within the community of people who read Givewell regularly, or in the broader community? Because that might be right for the former, but the latter has a lag that I expect to be measured in at least decades. Possibly centuries, given how much money still goes to churches.
I don’t think people who are giving their charity to churches are trying to give to the most efficient charity.
This is sort of the point. The more one is concerned with efficiency (like those who are concerned about the marginal benefit of a great charity vs. the best charity), the less an info-lag will have an effect on him/her. Effective Altruists who are thinking at the level of “I should only give to one absolutely best charity, to maximize marginal value”, are not likely to pick a charity and give to it blindly, never again looking at the least bit of evidence of marginal effectiveness.
I’m willing to wager that the marginal value lost due to an info lag when everyone is giving to only the best charity and aren’t paying enough attention, is vastly outweighed by the value produced due to everyone giving to the absolute best charities.
Sure, everyone should at a minimum aim to be very near the top, and the crowd who’d ever benefit from this discussion is the same crowd that’s least likely to suffer from lag. I’m attempting to make a theoretical case, not saying “Don’t donate to the best charities!”.
You get similar results by each individual giving to a different charity. As-is, there’s a few charities that are far above the rest, but if everyone thought like an effective altruist, that wouldn’t be the case. Consider the idea: if everyone bought the best TV then the factory that makes that model of TV would be inundated with orders.
That’s true but for now most of the problems are so large that even if almost everyone started thinking this way it would take a while before any high priority problem hit the point that it was no longer the best to donate to. Enough time for people to switch over to the next most important.
Diminishing returns. Giving $100M to a $10M problem because of information lag doesn’t actually allocate money nearly as efficiently as you might hope.
Do we have any evidence about the severity of that information lag? I can’t imagine it would be much more than a year. I don’t know if this is a legitimatize concern. It may very well be worth a little waste value from info-lag for the benefit of overall efficiency.
Are we talking about lag within the community of people who read Givewell regularly, or in the broader community? Because that might be right for the former, but the latter has a lag that I expect to be measured in at least decades. Possibly centuries, given how much money still goes to churches.
I don’t think people who are giving their charity to churches are trying to give to the most efficient charity.
This is sort of the point. The more one is concerned with efficiency (like those who are concerned about the marginal benefit of a great charity vs. the best charity), the less an info-lag will have an effect on him/her. Effective Altruists who are thinking at the level of “I should only give to one absolutely best charity, to maximize marginal value”, are not likely to pick a charity and give to it blindly, never again looking at the least bit of evidence of marginal effectiveness.
I’m willing to wager that the marginal value lost due to an info lag when everyone is giving to only the best charity and aren’t paying enough attention, is vastly outweighed by the value produced due to everyone giving to the absolute best charities.
Sure, everyone should at a minimum aim to be very near the top, and the crowd who’d ever benefit from this discussion is the same crowd that’s least likely to suffer from lag. I’m attempting to make a theoretical case, not saying “Don’t donate to the best charities!”.
You get similar results by each individual giving to a different charity. As-is, there’s a few charities that are far above the rest, but if everyone thought like an effective altruist, that wouldn’t be the case. Consider the idea: if everyone bought the best TV then the factory that makes that model of TV would be inundated with orders.
That’s true but for now most of the problems are so large that even if almost everyone started thinking this way it would take a while before any high priority problem hit the point that it was no longer the best to donate to. Enough time for people to switch over to the next most important.