IanDavidMoss
Posts 18
Comments250
FWIW, in the (rough) BOTECs we use for opportunity prioritization at Effective Institutions Project, this has been our conclusion as well. GCR prevention is tough to beat for cost-effectiveness even only considering impacts on a 10-year time horizon, provided you are comfortable making judgments based on expected value with wide uncertainty bands.
I think people have a cached intuition that "global health is most cost-effective on near-term timescales" but what's really happened is that "a well-respected charity evaluator that researches donation opportunities with highly developed evidence bases has selected global health as the most cost-effective cause with a highly-developed evidence base." Remove the requirement for certainty about the floor of impact that your donation will have, and all of the sudden a lot of stuff looks competitive with bednets on expected-value terms.
(I should caveat that we haven't yet tried to incorporate animal welfare into our calculations and therefore have no comparison there.)
Fun! I'm glad that you're working with experts on administering this and applaud the intention to post lessons learned. If you haven't already come across them, you might find these resources on participatory grantmaking helpful.
Several years ago, 12 self-identified women and people of color in EA wrote a collaborative article that directly addresses what it's like to be part of groups and spaces where conversation topics like this come up. It's worth a read. Making discussions in EA groups inclusive
I'll bite on the invitation to nominate my own content. This short piece of mine spent little time on the front page and didn't seem to capture much attention, either positive or negative. I'm not sure why, but I'd love for the ideas in it to get a second look, especially by people who know more about the topic than I do.
Title: Leveraging labor shortages as a pathway to career impact? [note: question mark was added today to better reflect the intended vibe of the post]
Author: Ian David Moss
Why it's good: I think it surfaces an important and rarely-discussed point that could have significant implications for norms and practices around EA community-building and career guidance if it were determined to be valid.
Hi David, thanks for your interest in our work! I need to preface this by emphasizing that the primary purpose of the quantitative model was to help us assess the relative importance of and promise of engaging with different institutions implicated in various existential risk scenarios. There was less attention given to the challenge of nailing the right absolute numbers, and so those should be taken with a super-extra-giant grain of salt.
With that said, the right way to understand the numbers in the model is that the estimates were about the impact over 100 years from a single one-time $100M commitment (perhaps distributed over multiple years) focusing on a single institution. The comment in the summary about $100 million/year was assuming that the funder(s) would focus on multiple institutions. Thus, the 100 basis points per billion figure is the "correct" one provided our per-institution estimates are in the right order of magnitude.
We're about to get started on our second iteration of this work and will have more capacity to devote to the cost-effectiveness estimates this time around, so hopefully that will result in less speculative outputs.
FYI, there's a US-focused organization with a similar mission to CEAP's called Unlock Aid that seems to be doing really good work. Open Philanthropy is also doing a lot of engagement with governments directly through its Global Aid Policy program.