Joey🔸
Bio
I want to make the biggest positive difference in the world that I can. My mission is to cause more effective charities to exist in the world by connecting talented individuals with high-impact intervention opportunities. This is why I co-founded the organisation Charity Entrepreneurship to achieve this through an extensive research process and incubation program.
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Hey Jamie, sorry my post made you feel bad. Indeed there are more nuances and it would be interesting to compile a more advanced pros and cons list on the topic of targeting younger folks. When AIM/me have thought about the pros and cons in deeper depth we tend to come out negative on it - specifically I do indeed think both value drift and flow through ecosystem effects to other parts of the movement are on average under-valubed by EAs. I wanted to call some attention to these two cons.
Part of this long but highly interesting blog series stood out to me
What the heck happened here? Why such a big difference? Was it:
- His spending was not high at the time the podcast happened.
- It was high, but 80k/EA didn't know about it.
- It was high, and 80k/EA did know, but it was introduced like this anyway.
Does anyone have a sense or a link to if this was talked about elsewhere?
An idea that has always motivated me is the idea of the veil of ignorance — the basic concept being, how would you want society to be if you did not know who you would be in it? A world where people in the top 25% donate significantly to those less well off has always appealed to me and felt right. The GWWC pledge was one of the first long-term charitable actions I took in this direction. I remember signing my paper copy of the pledge with four other friends, two of us taking the further pledge and the others taking the 10%. It felt both important and significant to our group and carried real weight.
So, I have some mixed views about this post. Let's start with the positive.
In terms of agreement: I do think organizational critics are valuable, and specifically, critics of ACE in the past have been helpful in improving their direction and impact. I also love the idea of having more charity evaluators (even in the same cause area) with slightly different methods or approaches to determining how to do good, so I’m excited to see this initiative. I also have quite a bit of sympathy for giving higher weight to explicit cost-effectiveness models when it comes to animal welfare evaluations.
I can personally relate to the feeling of being disappointed after digging deeper into the numbers of well-respected EA meta organizations, so I understand the tone and frustration. However, I suspect your arguments may get a lot of pushback on tone alone, which could distract from the more important substance of the post and concepts (I’ll leave that for others to address, as it feels less important, in my opinion).
In terms of disagreement: I will focus on what I think is the crux of the issue, which I would summarize as: (a) ACE uses a methodology that yields quite different results than a raw cost-effectiveness analysis; (b) this methodology seems to have major flaws, as it can lead to clearly incoherent conclusions and recommendations easily; and (c) thus, it is better to use a more straightforward, direct CEA.
I agree with points A and B, but I am much less convinced about point C. To me, this feels a bit like an isolated demand for methodological rigor. Every methodology has flaws, and it’s easy to find situations that lead to clearly incoherent conclusions. Expected value theory itself, using pure EV terms, has well-known issues like St. Petersburg Paradox, optimizer's curse, and general model mistakes. CEAs in general share these issues and have additional flaws (see more on this here). I think CEAs are a super useful tool, but they are ultimately a model of reality, not reality itself, and I think EA can sometimes get too caught up in them (whereas the rest of the world probably doesn’t use them nearly enough). GW, which has ~20x the budget of ACE, still finds model errors and openly discusses how softer judgments on ethics and discount factors influence outcomes (and they consider more than just a pure CEA calculation when recommending a charity).
Overall, being pretty familiar with ACE’s methodology and CEAs, I would expect, for example, that a 10-hour CEA of the same organizations would be quite a bit further from the truth of the actual impact or effectiveness of an organization. It's not clear to me that spending equal time on pure CEAs versus a mix of evaluative techniques (as ACE currently does) would lead to more accurate results (I would probably weakly bet against it). I think this post overstates the importance of discarding a model due to a flaw that can be exploited.
A softer argument, such as “ACE should spend double the percentage of time it currently spends on CEAs relative to other methods” or “ACE should ensure that intervention weightings do not overshadow program-level execution data,” is something I have a lot of sympathy for.
I do not think there is much reward in the charity sector for identifying undervalued organizations, particularly by criteria that differ from what the market as a whole aims for. Which sadly is not cost-effectiveness, etc. I think that’s part of why it’s a lot easier to find promising missed opportunities compared to the for-profit sector.
I do think it’s much harder (assuming ~equal time) for someone to spend $100 million cost-effectively compared to $100, due to systemic differences. However, I would predict there are many people who could spend $100,000 and get a higher ROI than many people spending $10 million, due to a lack of efficient delegation/regranting/communication between the two.
A thing that seems valuable but is not talked about much is organizations that bring talent into the EA/impact-focused charity world, vs. re-using people already in the movement, vs. turning people off the movement. The difference in these effects seems both significant and pretty consistent within an organization. I think Founders Pledge is a good example of an organization that, I think, net brings talent into the effective charities world. I often see their hires, post-leaving FP, go on to pretty impactful other roles that it’s not clear they would have done absent their experience working for FP. I wish more organizations did this vs. re-using/turning people off.
Not part of Founder's Pledge, but AIM did consider quite a few models like this when doing our founding-to-give program. Our pledge is higher, with 50% above $1M being the minimum. Right now, both ours and Founder's Pledge connect to individual giving (aka the profit the cofounder would take home personally) instead of, e.g., committing the company itself to donate. They are also both pretty "clean" models as they do not require a heavy administrative burden to take stocks, investments, deal with dilutions, etc.
Net, I think both models slightly benefit the companies with almost no impairment to them, which I think would not be the case with heavier models (e.g., directly taking stock, requiring company donated profits, etc.). Our reason for going this way was: