Charity investigators could be time-effective by optimizing non-cause-neutral donations.
There are a lot more non-EA donors than EA donors. It may also be the case that EA donation research is somewhat saturated.
Say you think that $1 donated to the best climate change intervention is worth 1/10th that of $1 for the best AI-safety intervention. But you also think that your work could increase the efficiency of $10mil of AI donations by 0.5%, but it could instead increase the efficiency of $50mil of climate change donations by 10%. Then, for you to maximize expected value, your time is best spent optimizing the climate change interventions.
The weird thing here may be in explaining this to the donors. “Yea, I’m spending my career researching climate change interventions, but my guess is that all these funders are 10x less effective than they would be by donating to other things.” While this may feel strange, both sides would benefit; the funders and the analysts would both be maximizing their goals.
Separately, there’s a second plus that teaching funders to be effectiveness-focused; it’s possible that this will eventually lead some of them to optimize further.
I think this may be the case in our current situation. There honestly aren’t too many obvious places for “effective talent” to go right now. There is a ton of potential funders out there that wouldn’t be willing to go to core EA causes any time soon, but may be able to be convinced to give much more effectively in their given areas. There could potentially be a great deal of work to be done doing this sort of thing.
Charity investigators could be time-effective by optimizing non-cause-neutral donations.
There are a lot more non-EA donors than EA donors. It may also be the case that EA donation research is somewhat saturated.
Say you think that $1 donated to the best climate change intervention is worth 1/10th that of $1 for the best AI-safety intervention. But you also think that your work could increase the efficiency of $10mil of AI donations by 0.5%, but it could instead increase the efficiency of $50mil of climate change donations by 10%. Then, for you to maximize expected value, your time is best spent optimizing the climate change interventions.
The weird thing here may be in explaining this to the donors. “Yea, I’m spending my career researching climate change interventions, but my guess is that all these funders are 10x less effective than they would be by donating to other things.” While this may feel strange, both sides would benefit; the funders and the analysts would both be maximizing their goals.
Separately, there’s a second plus that teaching funders to be effectiveness-focused; it’s possible that this will eventually lead some of them to optimize further.
I think this may be the case in our current situation. There honestly aren’t too many obvious places for “effective talent” to go right now. There is a ton of potential funders out there that wouldn’t be willing to go to core EA causes any time soon, but may be able to be convinced to give much more effectively in their given areas. There could potentially be a great deal of work to be done doing this sort of thing.