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by alamo 2914
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TL;DR: The explore-exploit tradeoff for causes is impossible if you don't know how far exploration could take you - how good the best causes may be. 

Recently, I found out that Centre for Exploratory Altruism Research (CEARCH) estimates, with a high confidence level, that advocacy for top sodium reduction policies is around 100x as cost-effective as top GiveWell charities, in terms of DALYs. This made me feel like a sucker, for having donated to GiveWell. 

You see, when I'm donating, I think of myself as buying a product - good for others. The hundreds of dollars I donated to GiveWell could've probably been replaced with a couple of dollars to this more effective cause. That means that I wasted hundreds of dollars, that could've done much more good. 

But let's use milk as an analogy. GiveWell is the equivalent of buying a liter of milk for 200$. If that happened with a product I wanted to buy for myself, I would probably feel scammed. A literal lifetime of donations to GiveWell might be replaced with 6 months of donating to this cause.  I'm not saying I got scammed, but thinking about it from the perspective of buying good intuitively helps. Nowadays I don't donate to GiveWell anyways, but it sucks.

This - being a sucker who pays too much for doing good - is really bad. It's exactly what we try to avoid in EA. It can decrease our impact by orders of magnitude. 

And that's not even the end. CEARCH also estimated (although with a low level of certainty) that nuclear arsenal limitation could be 5000x cost-effective as top GiveWell charities. If they're wrong by an order of magnitude, that's still 5x times better then even the hypertension work. Now donating to GiveWell is like buying a liter of milk for 1000$. And who's to say that there's nothing 50x more effective than the nuclear cause? 

At some point, you might consider to stop buying milk for the moment, and looking around for the cheapest prices. And you'll probably not get the cheapest, but you might be able to figure a reasonable estimate of them, and buy at a rate close to it.

So this situation made me think - can we put a reasonable limit to the maximum cost-effectiveness of our money and time? Within a 50% CI? 80 CI? 99% CI... And can we have a reasonable estimate for the time it will be reached?

For someone extremely risk-averse it's probably easy, as there are only so much RCTs in our world. And it's seems likely that GiveWell is within a close range. But for anyone that's risk-neutral, I can't think of a good way. So I've come to ask you wonderful people - what do you think?

The end result I'm thinking of is something like: 

"The maximum cost-effectiveness we can expect is 500x-50,000x that of GiveWell (95% CI). The year we expect to find a cause within an order of magnitude of that cost-effectiveness is 2035-2050 (50% CI)".

But of course any input will be interesting. 

Things that could potentially limit cost-effectiveness, off the top of my head:

  • A weak form of the 'stable market hypothesis' for doing good.
  • Hedonic adaptation - people adapt to better circumstances. The amount of good we can induce in anyone's lives is thus limited. 
  • Caps on the amount of humans & other beings that are likely to ever live.

 

Note: I'm emotionally content with my past donations to GiveWell, don't worry. Also, this is not a diss on GiveWell, they're doing a great job for their goals. 

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Jason

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CEARCH's work is, as the name implies, exploratory. It searches for new potential programs and cause areas. It recognizes that early-stage CEAs often overstate the effectiveness of a program. Even its deep CEA on hypertension relies on a lot of guesswork in my view.

I personally think its work is often seriously overoptimistic, especially when it comes to predicting the success and ease of lobbying efforts against considerable opposition. But that's more okay given its exploratory function. If there were a shovel-ready sodium-reduction charity ready to receive and deploy significant funds, I would view that as akin to buying equity in a brand-new startup.

GiveWell does something entirely different with its Top Charities -- you're getting a specific implementation of a program by a carefully vetted charity, with a pretty tight cost-effectiveness analysis based on either the charity's actual performance or efficacy of similar real-world interventions in a randomized controlled trial. 

The extent to which people should prefer tried-and-true interventions versus novel-but-potentially-higher-impact ones is a recurrent question. But most of us retail global-health donors who have done our research, as well as the bulk of the money from big donors in EA global health, goes to the tried-and-true. That is a pretty good clue that we are not all being "scammed" here!

Finally, to the extent that work with insanely good cost-effectiveness exists, that work often has limited room for more funding. Here, for instance, both of your examples involve lobbying.

Joel Tan🔸13
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Hi Jason,

I agree with the broad thrust of your comment that there's a tradeoff between guaranteed performance vs potentially higher impact stuff.

That said, I would push back on two points:

(1) With respect to our work being "seriously overoptimistic, especially when it comes to predicting the success and ease of lobbying efforts against considerable opposition." I think some of our earlier/shallower  CEAs definitely do suffer from that, but our deep CEAs are (a) highly comprehensive, factoring in a multiple of relevant temporal/epistemic discounts; and (b) are far more sceptical of advocacy efforts (e.g. we think there is a 6% chance of success for sodium reduction advocacy in a single country over 3 years. i.e. if you did 48 country-years of lobbying you'll get one win). Amongst the various considerations informing this estimate is, of course, the reality of industry pushback.

(b) I disagree to a limited but fairly significant extent, on the notion that such work has limited room for more funding. Scaling works differently in advocacy than in direct delivery. You pay more to buy increased chances of success (e.g. the difference between funding a small NGO vs hiring a professional lobbying outfit vs hiring ex-government officials to lobby for you). Of course, diminishing marginal returns apply (as opposed to economies of scale in direct delivery - though in the long run, there's always DMR as we work our way down the list of priority countries).

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alamo 29143
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Thanks for the reply!

If I understand your main arguments correctly, you're basically saying that high cost-effectiveness options are rare, uncertain, and have a relatively small funding gap that is likely to be closed anyways. Also new charities are likely to fail, and can be less effective. And smart EAs won't waste their money. 

Uncertainty and rarity: Assume that CEARCH is on average 5x too optimistic about their high confidence level report, 20x too optimistic about their low confidence stuff (that's A LOT). Still, out of 17 causes they researched,... (read more)

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Jason
I think we agree on somewhat more than it seems at first glance. I don't think the current GiveWell top charities are the pinnacle of cost-effectiveness, support further cause exploration and incubating the most promising ideas into charities, and think it's quite possible for EA funders to miss important stuff.  The crux is that I don't think it's warranted to directly compare cost-effectiveness analyses conducted on a few weeks of desktop research, expert interviews and commissioning of surveys and quantitative modelling to evaluations of specific charities at scale and in action, and I think your original post did that with allusions to scamming, GiveWell charities as $1000 liters of milk, and being a sucker.  Although CEARCH is too young to us retrospectively compare its analyses to the cost-effectiveness of launched charities, I think something like drug development is a good analogy. Lots of stuff looks great on paper, in situ, or even in animal models, only to fall apart entirely in the multi-phase human clinical trial process on the way to full approval. Comparing how a drug does in limited animal models to how another drug does in Phase III trials is comparing apples to oranges. Moreover, "risk the model/drug will fall apart in later phases" is distinct from "risk after Phase III trials that the model/drug will not work in a specific country/patient." To be very clear, this is not a criticism of CEARCH -- as I see it, its job is to screen candidate interventions, not to bring them up to the level of mature, shovel-ready interventions. The next step would be either incubation or a deep dive on a specific target charity already doing this work. I would expect to see a ton of false positives, just as I would expect that from the earliest phases of drug development. It's worth it to find the next ten-figure drug / blockbuster EA intervention. I think this should make you question your assumptions to some extent. GiveWell has evaluated tons of interventions
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alamo 2914
I might've used too strong of a language with my original post, such as the talk about being a sucker. For me it's useful to think about donations as a product I'm buying, but I probably took it too far. And I don't think I've properly emphasized my main message, which was (as I've added later) - the explore-exploit tradeoff for causes is really hard if you don't know how far exploration could take you. Honestly, I'm most interested in your take on that. I initially only used GiveWell and CEARCH to demonstrate that argument and show I how got to it.     The drug analogy is interesting, although I prefer the start-up analogy. Drug development is more binary - some drugs can just flat-out fail in humans, while start-ups are more of a spectrum (the ROI might be smaller than thought etc.). I don't see a reason to think of CEARCH recommended programs or for most other exploratory stuff as binary. Of course lobbying could flat-out fail, but it's unlikely we'll have to update our beliefs that this charity would NEVER work, as might happen in drug development. And obviously with start-ups, there's also a lot of difference between the initial market research and the later stages (as you said).   GiveWell has a lot of flaws for cause exploration. They really focus on charity research, not cause research. It's by design really biased towards existing causes and charities. The charities must be interested and cooperate with GiveWell. They look for the track record, i.e. charities operating in high-risk, low tractibillity areas such as policy have a harder time. In most cases it makes sense, sometimes it can miss great opportunities.  Yes, they've funded some policy focused charities, but they might've funded much more if they were more EV maximizing instead of risk-averse. Seeing the huge leverage such options provide, it's entirely possible.  Also, they aren't always efficient - look at GiveDirectly. Their bar for top charities was 10x GiveDirectly for years, yet they kept
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