FWIW I'm happy this question was asked publicly: I had no idea about this ruling (which is just extremely cruel and unhelpful) and this is a serious inclusion issue. 

Yeah, this is a good point: you can go a long way with just commitment/agency/creativity/confidence/?

I mean, maybe people who are strong in those traits aren't really "mediocre", ?

But yeah, this is a good reminder that excellence isn't just one axis.

Thanks for writing this! I’ve long been suspicious of this idea but haven’t got round to investigating the claim itself, and my skepticism of it, fully, so I super appreciate you kicking off this discussion.

I also identify with ‘do I disagree with this empirically or am I just uneasy with the vibes/frame, how to tease those apart, ?'

For people who broadly agree with the idea that Sarah is critiquing: what do you think is the best defence of it, arguing from first principles and data as much as possible?

I have a couple of other queries/scepticisms about the power-law argument. I haven’t read all the other comments, so sorry if I repeat stuff said elsewhere.

1. Does it empirically hold up even assuming you can attribute stuff to individuals?
You focus a lot on critiquing conceptual idea of the individual impact of one person (since most actions happen in the context of other actions and actors). I think I also have empirical disagreements with the claim even if we can tease out what impact comes from which person. 

It feels to me like EAs sometimes over-generalize that finding from global health interventions — where I don’t doubt that it holds up — to other domains, where it hasn’t been established (e.g., orgs working in longtermist causes, or people compared to their peers, or actions one takes in one’s career). It’s possible that there *is* more discussion and substantiation of this idea out there, but I just haven’t seen it.

Like, even if we accept that (per your example) the President does have much more impact than the average person, or (per Jeff’s example above) a larger donor has more impact than a smaller donor to the same charity, can I generalize that to the actions available to me personally, or to questions of how impactful ‘overall’ I can be compared to my peers? What’s the empirical justification for such generalizations?

2. Is the bar low? Does this depend on how you define the space?

Benjamin Todd, in the article you linked, claims that the power-law pattern has been found in many areas of social impact. I’m sure this is true, but I want to point out that this is kind of contingent, not a law of nature. E.g., I’d guess this is due to some combination of ‘there’s not a culture of measuring outcomes and prioritization in general philanthropy’ (that’s kind of the whole point of EA) and/or ‘the world is very complicated and it’s hard to know ex ante (and sometimes even ex post) what will work/what did work’. 

Like, if there were a culture shift in philanthropy across the board meaning that interventions would only be funded or carried out if they met some effectiveness bar, would we still expect interventions to be power-law distributed? Surely less so?

To frame this another way, imagine I said to you ‘the nutritional value of foods follows a power-law distribution’, and you were like ‘hmm’, but then it turned out that among ‘foods’ I was counting inedible objects like chairs and rocks and grass. So yes, only a minority of objects have most of the nutritional value, but anything we’d call food is in the heavy tail, and this is a kind of silly frame.

This point isn’t fully worked out but yeah, I wonder if ‘what counts as the distribution’ is kind of socially constructed in a way that’s not always helpful.  
 

I guess I weakly disagree: I think that motivation and already having roots in an issue really are a big part of personal fit - especially now that lots of "classic EA jobs" seem highly oversubscribed, even if the cause areas are more neglected than they should be. 

Like to make this more concrete, if your climate-change-motivated young EA was like 'well, now that I've learnt about AI risk, I guess I should pursue that career, ?', but they don't feel excited about it. Even if they have the innate ability to excel in AI safety, they will still have to outcompete people who have already built up expertize there, many of whom will find it easier to motivate themselves to work hard because they are interested in AI. 

(On the object level, I assume that many roles in climate change and gender equality stuff are in fact more impactful than many roles in more canonical EA cause areas). 


 

Thanks for writing this! As others have said, thank you for trying to do this valuable work even if it didn't work out. 

I haven't read everything so sorry if you mention this elsewhere but I'm confused about:

-'Of the three studies we found that measure the effects of facility-based postpartum family planning programming on pregnancy rates, two found no effect (Rohr et al. 2024; Coulibaly et al. 2021), and one found only a 0.7% decrease in short-spaced pregnancies (Guo et al. 2022).
This suggests that facility-based programs may have limited to no effect on reducing unintended pregnancies despite increasing contraceptive uptake.'

Why might programs increase contraceptive uptake but not reduce unintended pregnancies? Is it mainly because many who take the contraceptives are in the postpartum insusceptibility period anyway? 

This is a cool idea!

FYI, if you're excited about one of these ideas but struggling to actually get it drafted and posted, I can help with that. I wrote more here:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4towuFeBfbGn8hJGs/amber-dawn-s-shortform?commentId=C6Z7u57FHh6nYqo4N

Since the season of Draft Amnesty is upon us, a bit of mild self-promotion: you can hire me to help you turn your unwritten thoughts and messy drafts into posts. 

For example:

-if some sections of your post are in your head but not yet on the page, I can help you draft them
-if you feel self-conscious about your draft, I can quickly review it and fix or flag the biggest issues
-if you feel ugh-y or uncertain about posting or finishing your post, or if you have anxieties about posting more generally, I can talk you through that
-I agree with the Forum team that it can be very valuable to share even unpolished and unfinished drafts, but if you'd like to publish a more polished post, I can help with editing and structuring

I have collaborated on a bunch of Forum posts.

Happy drafting! 

Thanks for the shout-out! I just want to add that I also offer writing coaching, for those who want to learn how to make their own writing clearer and more effective.