TLDR: Eventually, we want higher and higher levels of worthwhile delegation. This will take work.
Rigor: Very quickly written rant. I want to experiment with getting more pieces like these out there, as opposed to focusing more on polish. Feedback is appreciated.
Example 1: Bricks
- Low delegation: You assemble bricks for your house
- Medium: You hire a team to put together your house
- High: You tell an assistant that you want a house. They go about choosing a plan and selecting a team.
- Very high: You tell an assistant to “make your life better”, they decide that a house is the best approach, and then they go about figuring it out.
Example 2: Charity
- Low delegation: You give food to a homeless person
- Medium: You donate to a nonprofit feeding the homeless
- High: You donate to a nonprofit fund that re-grants to nonprofits that help the homeless
- Very high: You donate to a fund to “do useful stuff”, and they sometimes decide that helping the homeless is ideal.
If delegation can be well managed, it’s incredibly useful. There’s always more and more stuff to do and be concerned about. We clearly want to hand off as much work as possible to others and then for those tasks to achieve economies of scale.
Those who can delegate well, often win. This is exactly the job of CEOs/entrepreneurs/managers. Companies with great teams that can be given bold projects with little oversight, or nations with very low political corruption or infighting.
Right now in the US, we don't trust the government much, so it's relegated to a low delegation level. This means it just simply can't do that much.
The higher level you delegate, the more agency you (typically) sacrifice. When you choose a house construction crew, you’ll have a bit less control over your brick types. When you choose some highly-meta-nonprofit-fund, you give them incredibly broad authority to handle your money.
Typically delegation breaks down somewhere between levels 1-4. Sometimes this is due to undertrust; you expect the authority will be corrupt or poor, even if they won’t be. Sometimes it’s overtrust; you mistakenly expect things to go well, then they abuse or misuse the agency.
To work well:
- There needs to be significant amounts of justified trust between client and provider
- The costs of delegation must be lower than the benefits
Most altruists seem to be in either the “medium” levels, or the unjustified “very high levels” (for example, donating to a single politician or cult to fix all of one’s problems). Some are in the low levels and just go out and try to help people personally (with widely mixed results).
On one hand, you have literal cult leaders, and on the other, you have millionaire altruists literally laying bricks to build houses.
Right now in EA, we have some “high” levels of funding delegation (EA Funds, GiveWell), but it's limited.
There’s a ton of value at hand on moving towards more delegation and increasing the amount of justified trust. “Everyone trying to do all of the necessary analysis on all things” themselves clearly doesn’t scale, and it should be clear that very few people are strong at this.
I don’t see that much literature at this level of abstraction, but I often see arguments like,
“We can’t trust the authorities”
“It’s important to think for yourself”
I get that, but it seems like it’s arguing on the wrong axis. We really want to push forward the Pareto frontier of delegation potential. That’s much more important, in the long run, than small decisions of where on that frontier we want to be right now. The frontier right now is bad and I think we could do much better.
Very true. One of the things that makes good delegation hard is its increasing potential for corruption.
While I don't worry much about corruption inside EA for now, this seems to be a significant problem for society at large? I wonder if there are culture-independent patterns for what low-corruption societies look like 🤔
If I try to inquire myself for why I donate directly to GiveDirectly instead of donating to an EA Fund, something that comes up is a desire for "control" and "defensibility". In an imaginary conversation, I can justify why I give large sums of money to GiveDirectly and why it is a Good Thing To Do to efficiently give money to the very poor. OTOH, giving money to an EA Fund feels much more amorphous and much harder to explain and justify what is happening with it and why it is a good idea.
Thanks agree that corruption is a big problem for society at large. At the same time though, with some work, we can make sure that groups are not very corrupt. My intuition is that a great deal of competitive markets have very low corruption; I’d expect that Amazon runs pretty effectively, for instance. I think we can aim for similar levels in our charity delegation structures. It will take some monitoring/ evaluation/transparency, but it definitely seems doable.
My impression is that many groups that complain about corruption actually do fairly little to actively try to remove corruption. When good and agentic CEOs want to stamp it out, they often do.
With GiveDirectly/ EA Funds, I’m not arguing that right now one is better than the other (as I’m guessing you realized, but I’m not sure about other readers). My main point is that we should be aiming for a future that leans more in the direction of “a really solid EA Funds”. That would help in so many ways.
(Note that if we want more minds on the topic, we can achieve they at the same time, with something more like a Crypto DAO, or a version of EA Funds that takes a lot of user contributions for research)
If you have ideas of what you’d want in EA Funds (or maybe GiveWell’s general fund), those would be interesting.
I also donate directly to charities I choose, looking at recommendations from GiveWell, rather than delegating to EA Funds / GiveWell.
Reasons for delegating:
-better coordination
-they might have better/more up-to-date empirical information about the kinds of charities that match my values
Reasons for not delegating:
-money gets to recipient charity faster (monthly, not quarterly)
-less bank fees
-funds almost certainly won't match my values exactly
-I can double-check their work (I still think some of the deworming assumptions are absolutely ludicrous)
Ambiguous:
-I'm nervous about a fund finding a new opportunity and suddenly leaving a charity with a large funding gap, crippling a very good charity. Ideally this would be solved by the fund phasing over to the new opportunity slowly. In practice it can also be solved by individual donors taking a long time to move to new recommendations (or not moving).
For what it's worth, I think the best reason not to delegate is something like:
"Funding work is hard, and funders have limited time. If you can do some funding work yourself, that could basically contribute to the amount of funding work beign done." (This works in some cases, not for others)
> I'm nervous about a fund finding a new opportunity and suddenly leaving a charity with a large funding gap, crippling a very good charity.
I think that funding work is a lot more work than just making yearly yes/no statements that are in-isolation ideal. There's more to do, like communicating with charities and keeping commitments.
In theory, a cluster of medium to large funders could do a better job than individual donors, but that's not always the case.