America’s response to covid seems like one example of this.
If I’m remembering correctly from Zvi’s blog posts, he criticized the US’s policy for being a sort of worst of both worlds middle ground. A strong, decisive requirement to enforce things like masking and distancing might have actually eradicated the virus and thus been worthwhile. But if you’re not going to take an aggressive enough stance, you should just forget it: half-hearted mitigation policies don’t do enough to “complete the bridge” and so aren’t worth the economic and social costs.
It’s not a perfect example. The “unfinished bridge” here provides positive value, not zero value. But I think the amount of positive value is low enough that it would be useful to round it down to zero. The important thing is that you get a big jump in value once you cross some threshold of progress.
I think a lot of philanthropic causes are probably in a similar boat.
When there are lots of small groups spread around making very marginal progress on a bunch of different goals, it’s as if they’re building a bunch of unfinished bridges. This too isn’t a perfect example because the “unfinished bridges” provide some value, but like the covid example, I think the amount of value is small enough that we can just round it to zero.
On the other hand, when people get a little barbaric and rally around a single cause, there might be enough concentration of force to complete the bridge.
America’s response to covid seems like one example of this.
If I’m remembering correctly from Zvi’s blog posts, he criticized the US’s policy for being a sort of worst of both worlds middle ground. A strong, decisive requirement to enforce things like masking and distancing might have actually eradicated the virus and thus been worthwhile. But if you’re not going to take an aggressive enough stance, you should just forget it: half-hearted mitigation policies don’t do enough to “complete the bridge” and so aren’t worth the economic and social costs.
It’s not a perfect example. The “unfinished bridge” here provides positive value, not zero value. But I think the amount of positive value is low enough that it would be useful to round it down to zero. The important thing is that you get a big jump in value once you cross some threshold of progress.
I think a lot of philanthropic causes are probably in a similar boat.
When there are lots of small groups spread around making very marginal progress on a bunch of different goals, it’s as if they’re building a bunch of unfinished bridges. This too isn’t a perfect example because the “unfinished bridges” provide some value, but like the covid example, I think the amount of value is small enough that we can just round it to zero.
On the other hand, when people get a little barbaric and rally around a single cause, there might be enough concentration of force to complete the bridge.