It’s only relevant if you’re so confident in it that you don’t feel the need to do any double-checking—that the right amount of research to do is zero or nearly zero.
My contention is that the people who are willing to participate in this have already done non-negligible amounts of thinking on this topic, because they are EA hobbyists. How could one be engaging with the EA community if they are not spending time thinking about the core issues at hand? Because of diminishing marginal returns, they are already paying the costs for the research that has the highest marginal value, in terms of their engagement with the community and reflection on these topics. I do not believe this is addressed in the original article. I believe this is our fundamental disagreement.
The objection of value misalignment can’t be priced in because there is no pricing mechanism at play here, so I’m not sure what you mean (except for paulfchristiano’s fee for administering the fund). That exact point was not the main thrust of the paragraph, however. The main thrust of that paragraph was to explain the two possible outcomes in the lottery, and explain how both lead to potential negative outcomes in light of the diminishing marginal returns to original research and the availability of a person’s time in light of outside circumstances.
I am in the target market in the sense that I donate to EA charities, and I think that SOMEONE doing research improves its impact, but I guess I am not in the target market in the sense that I think that person has to be me.
Regarding your snips about my not reading the article, it’s true that if I had more time and more interest in this topic, I would offer better quality engagement with your ideas, so I apologize that I lack those things.
By “priced in,” I meant something like—you shouldn’t be counting the benefits from the cases where you lose anyway, otherwise you end up effectively double-counting contributions.
On trusting GiveWell:
Apple knows much, much more about what makes a smartphone good than I do. They’ve put huge amounts of research into it. Therefore I shouldn’t try to build my own smartphone (because I expect there are genuinely huge returns to scale). This doesn’t mean that I should defer to Apple’s judgment about whether I should buy a smartphone, or which one to buy.
Samsung’s also put much, much more work than I have into what the optimal arrangement of a smartphone is. That doesn’t help me decide whether to buy an iPhone or a Samsung.
McDonald’s has put similarly huge amounts of expert work into figuring out how to optimally produce hamburgers than I have, but I still expect that I can easily produce a much higher-quality product in my own home, so it’s not even always the case that some types of returns to scale mean one can’t compete on small batches.
Givewell is different than those examples certainly. Your examples all include a clear motive to convince people to use their product, even if there are better out there. Givewell are analysts, not producers of good, and are explicitly trying to guide people to the best choice (within a set of constraints).
A better example would be choosing a restaurant. Michelin and Yelp have far more data and have put far more work into evaluating and rating food providers than you ever can. But you still need to figure out how your preferences fit into their evaluation framework, and navigate the always-changing landscape to make an actual choice.
(note that the conclusion is the same: you still must expend some search cost
Givewell are analysts, not producers of good, and are explicitly trying to guide people to the best choice (within a set of constraints).
A lot of the mission of Givewell is also EA movement building. By advocating the standard that evidence is important existing charities will focus on on finding evidence for their claims.
I don’t think “incentive” cuts at the joints here, but selection pressure does. You’re going to hear about the best self-promoters targeting you, which is only an indicator of qualities you care about to the extent that those qualities contributes to self-promotion in that market.
Personal experience: I occasionally use Yelp, but in some cases it’s worse than useless because I care about a pretty high standard of food quality, and often Yelp restaurant reviews are about whether the waiter was nice, the restaurant seemed fancy, the portions were big, sometimes people mark restaurants down for having inventive & therefore challenging food, etc. So I often get better information from the Chowhound message board, which no one except foodies has heard of.
My contention is that the people who are willing to participate in this have already done non-negligible amounts of thinking on this topic, because they are EA hobbyists. How could one be engaging with the EA community if they are not spending time thinking about the core issues at hand? Because of diminishing marginal returns, they are already paying the costs for the research that has the highest marginal value, in terms of their engagement with the community and reflection on these topics. I do not believe this is addressed in the original article. I believe this is our fundamental disagreement.
The objection of value misalignment can’t be priced in because there is no pricing mechanism at play here, so I’m not sure what you mean (except for paulfchristiano’s fee for administering the fund). That exact point was not the main thrust of the paragraph, however. The main thrust of that paragraph was to explain the two possible outcomes in the lottery, and explain how both lead to potential negative outcomes in light of the diminishing marginal returns to original research and the availability of a person’s time in light of outside circumstances.
I am in the target market in the sense that I donate to EA charities, and I think that SOMEONE doing research improves its impact, but I guess I am not in the target market in the sense that I think that person has to be me.
Regarding your snips about my not reading the article, it’s true that if I had more time and more interest in this topic, I would offer better quality engagement with your ideas, so I apologize that I lack those things.
By “priced in,” I meant something like—you shouldn’t be counting the benefits from the cases where you lose anyway, otherwise you end up effectively double-counting contributions.
On trusting GiveWell:
Apple knows much, much more about what makes a smartphone good than I do. They’ve put huge amounts of research into it. Therefore I shouldn’t try to build my own smartphone (because I expect there are genuinely huge returns to scale). This doesn’t mean that I should defer to Apple’s judgment about whether I should buy a smartphone, or which one to buy.
Samsung’s also put much, much more work than I have into what the optimal arrangement of a smartphone is. That doesn’t help me decide whether to buy an iPhone or a Samsung.
McDonald’s has put similarly huge amounts of expert work into figuring out how to optimally produce hamburgers than I have, but I still expect that I can easily produce a much higher-quality product in my own home, so it’s not even always the case that some types of returns to scale mean one can’t compete on small batches.
Do you think GiveWell’s substantially different?
Givewell is different than those examples certainly. Your examples all include a clear motive to convince people to use their product, even if there are better out there. Givewell are analysts, not producers of good, and are explicitly trying to guide people to the best choice (within a set of constraints).
A better example would be choosing a restaurant. Michelin and Yelp have far more data and have put far more work into evaluating and rating food providers than you ever can. But you still need to figure out how your preferences fit into their evaluation framework, and navigate the always-changing landscape to make an actual choice.
(note that the conclusion is the same: you still must expend some search cost
A lot of the mission of Givewell is also EA movement building. By advocating the standard that evidence is important existing charities will focus on on finding evidence for their claims.
I don’t think “incentive” cuts at the joints here, but selection pressure does. You’re going to hear about the best self-promoters targeting you, which is only an indicator of qualities you care about to the extent that those qualities contributes to self-promotion in that market.
Personal experience: I occasionally use Yelp, but in some cases it’s worse than useless because I care about a pretty high standard of food quality, and often Yelp restaurant reviews are about whether the waiter was nice, the restaurant seemed fancy, the portions were big, sometimes people mark restaurants down for having inventive & therefore challenging food, etc. So I often get better information from the Chowhound message board, which no one except foodies has heard of.