(Poster's note: Given subject matter I am posting an additional copy here in the EA Forum. The theoretically canonical copy of this post is on my Substack and I also post to Wordpress and LessWrong.)
Recently on Twitter, in response to seeing a contest announcement asking for criticism of EA, I offered some criticism of that contest’s announcement.
That sparked a bunch of discussion about central concepts in Effective Altruism. Those discussions ended up including Dustin Moskovitz, who showed an excellent willingness to engage and make clear how his models worked. The whole thing seems valuable enough to preserve in a form that one can navigate, hence this post.
This compiles what I consider the most important and interesting parts of that discussion into post form, so it can be more easily seen and referenced, including in the medium-to-long term.
There are a lot of offshoots and threads involved, so I’m using some editorial discretion to organize and filter.
To create as even-handed and useful a resource as possible, I am intentionally not going to interject commentary into the conversation here beyond the bare minimum.
As usual, I use screenshots for most tweets to guard against potential future deletions or suspensions, with links to key points in the threads.
(As Kevin says, I did indeed mean should there.)
At this point there are two important threads that follow, and one additional reply of note.
Thread one, which got a bit tangled at the beginning but makes sense as one thread:
Thread two, which took place the next day and went in a different direction.
Link here to Ben’s post, GiveWell and the problem of partial funding.
Link to GiveWell blog post on giving now versus later.
Dustin’s “NO WE ARE FAILING” point seemed important so I highlighted it.
There was also a reply from Eliezer.
And this on pandemics in particular.
Sarah asked about the general failure to convince Dustin’s friends.
These two notes branch off of Ben’s comment that covers-all-of-EA didn’t make sense.
Ben also disagreed with the math that there was lots of opportunity, linking to his post A Drowning Child is Hard to Find.
This thread responds to Dustin’s claim that you need to know details about the upgrade to the laptop further up the main thread, I found it worthwhile but did not include it directly for reasons of length.
This came in response to Dustin’s challenge on whether info was 10x better.
After the main part of thread two, there was a different discussion about pressures perhaps being placed on students to be performative, which I found interesting but am not including for length.
This response to the original Tweet is worth noting as well.
Again, thanks to everyone involved and sorry if I missed your contribution.
I'm not suggesting you keep all the resources, I'm suggesting you give them to someone even more capable (and better informed) than someone equally capable, to increase the probability that they'll be directly allocated by someone more capable.
Keep in mind that many things you might want to fund are in scope of an existing fund, including even small grants for things like laptops. You can just recommend they apply to these funds. If they don't get any money, I'd guess there were better options you would have missed but should have funded first. You may also be unaware of ways it would backfire, and the reason something doesn't get funded is because others judge it to be net negative. We get into unilateralist curse territory. There are of course cases where you might have better info about an opportunity, but this should be balanced against having worse info about other opportunities.
Of course, if you are very capable, then plausibly you should join a fund as a grantmaker or start your own or just make your own direct donations, but you'd want to see what other grantmakers are and aren't funding and why, or where their bar for cost-effectiveness is and what red flags they use, at least.