I’m surprised that you think that direct work has such a high impact multiplier relative to one’s normal salary. The footnote seems to suggest that you expect someone who could get a $100K salary trying to earn to give could provide $3M in impact per year.
I think GiveWell still estimates it can save a life for ~$6K on the margin, which is ~50 QALYs.
(life / $6K) X (50 QALY / life) X ($3 million / EA year) ~= 25K QALY per EA year
Which both seems like a very high figure and seems to imply that 66K EAs would be sufficient to do good equivalent to totally eliminating the burden of all disease (I’m ignoring decreasing marginal returns). This seems like an optimistic figure to me, unless you’re very optimistic about X-risk charities being effective? I’d be curious to hear how you got to the ~3 million figure intuitively.
I would guess something closer to 5-10X impact relative to industry salary, rather than a 30X impact.
GiveWell still estimates it can save a life for ~$6K on the margin
Not really? In 2021 they announced that (a) they were lowering their funding bar from 8x GiveDirectly to 5x essentially because they are pessimistic long-term about finding things that meet the 8x bar, and (b) that even with the lower bar they still had more money than they could cost effectively direct right now. This is really great news, but it means that the marginal impact of money is now much lower.
seems to imply that 66K EAs would be sufficient to … I would guess something closer to 5-10X impact relative to industry salary
Then instead of 66K EAs you need 300K EAs. Is that much more plausible? I think arguments in the form of your “seems to imply...” don’t work very well.
unless you’re very optimistic about X-risk charities being effective?
I don’t know if I would say very optimistic, but I do think work here is extremely important (more).
Fair point that GiveWell has updated their RFMF and increased their estimated cost per QALY.
I do think that 300K EAs doing something equivalent to eliminating the global disease burden is substantially more plausible than 66K doing so. This seems trivially true since more people can do more than fewer people. I agree that it still sounds ambitious, but saying that ~3X the people involved in the Manhattan project could eliminate the disease burden certainly sounds easier than doing the same with half the Manhattan project’s workforce size.
This is getting into nits, but ruling out all arguments of the form ‘this seems to imply’ seems really strong? Like, it naively seems to limit me to only discussing to implications that the argument maker explicitly acknowledges. I’m probably mis-interpreting you here though, since that seems really silly! This is usually what I’m trying to say when I ask about implications; I note something odd to see if the oddness is implied or if I misinterpreted something.
Agreed that X-risk is very important and also hard to quantify.
My guess is that it’s something like “the impact of mitigating x-risks is probably orders of magnitude greater than public health interventions” (which might be what you meant by “unless you’re very optimistic about X-risk charities being effective”).
Agreed, although it feels like in that case we should be comparing ‘donating to X-risk organizations’ vs ‘working at X-risk organizations’. I think that by default I would assume that the money vs talent trade-off is similar at global health and X-risk organizations though.
I’m surprised that you think that direct work has such a high impact multiplier relative to one’s normal salary. The footnote seems to suggest that you expect someone who could get a $100K salary trying to earn to give could provide $3M in impact per year.
I think GiveWell still estimates it can save a life for ~$6K on the margin, which is ~50 QALYs.
(life / $6K) X (50 QALY / life) X ($3 million / EA year) ~= 25K QALY per EA year
Which both seems like a very high figure and seems to imply that 66K EAs would be sufficient to do good equivalent to totally eliminating the burden of all disease (I’m ignoring decreasing marginal returns). This seems like an optimistic figure to me, unless you’re very optimistic about X-risk charities being effective? I’d be curious to hear how you got to the ~3 million figure intuitively.
I would guess something closer to 5-10X impact relative to industry salary, rather than a 30X impact.
Not really? In 2021 they announced that (a) they were lowering their funding bar from 8x GiveDirectly to 5x essentially because they are pessimistic long-term about finding things that meet the 8x bar, and (b) that even with the lower bar they still had more money than they could cost effectively direct right now. This is really great news, but it means that the marginal impact of money is now much lower.
Then instead of 66K EAs you need 300K EAs. Is that much more plausible? I think arguments in the form of your “seems to imply...” don’t work very well.
I don’t know if I would say very optimistic, but I do think work here is extremely important (more).
Fair point that GiveWell has updated their RFMF and increased their estimated cost per QALY.
I do think that 300K EAs doing something equivalent to eliminating the global disease burden is substantially more plausible than 66K doing so. This seems trivially true since more people can do more than fewer people. I agree that it still sounds ambitious, but saying that ~3X the people involved in the Manhattan project could eliminate the disease burden certainly sounds easier than doing the same with half the Manhattan project’s workforce size.
This is getting into nits, but ruling out all arguments of the form ‘this seems to imply’ seems really strong? Like, it naively seems to limit me to only discussing to implications that the argument maker explicitly acknowledges. I’m probably mis-interpreting you here though, since that seems really silly! This is usually what I’m trying to say when I ask about implications; I note something odd to see if the oddness is implied or if I misinterpreted something.
Agreed that X-risk is very important and also hard to quantify.
My guess is that it’s something like “the impact of mitigating x-risks is probably orders of magnitude greater than public health interventions” (which might be what you meant by “unless you’re very optimistic about X-risk charities being effective”).
Agreed, although it feels like in that case we should be comparing ‘donating to X-risk organizations’ vs ‘working at X-risk organizations’. I think that by default I would assume that the money vs talent trade-off is similar at global health and X-risk organizations though.