!tags:: #lit✍/📰️article #status🚦/🟢green
!links:: Effective Altruism (EA) Charity Effectiveness

=this.file.name

Reference

• Why Charities Usually Don't Differ Astronomically in Expected Cost-Effectiveness - EA Forum

Notes

• Flow-Through Effects
• "Spending money is like pushing on how society apportions its resources. The world has labor and capital that can be applied to one task or another (charity work, building mansions, playing video games, etc.), and any way you spend money amounts to pushing more labor/capital toward certain uses and away from others. Money doesn't create productive capacity; it just moves it. And when we move resources in one region, "we find it hitched to everything else" in the economy. I picture spending money like pulling up a piece of dough in one spot: It increases that spot and also tugs (either positively or negatively) on other dough, most strongly the other dough in its vicinity.
• "In general, there's no hard distinction between charity vs. other types of consumption and investment. There's just spending money and encouraging some activities more than others, with society classifying some of those activities as "charity.""
• "A mistake I sometimes see people make is using the initial rates of return on an investment to judge its urgency. But those returns last for a brief period before spreading out into the broader world, so you should really think of the investment as giving you a fixed multiplier on your dollar before spreading out and having a long-term returns that go like growth rates.". - Paul Christiano
• "fungibility of good" - Term coined by Holden Karnofsky to describe the situation in which solving some problems opens up resources to focus on other problems
  e.g. solving the issue of lab animal abuse so people who are focused on that issue will then move to working on farmed animal welfare
• "Entropy in Cost-Effectiveness" - The idea that as you learn more about a cause (and thus get a better understanding about all the hidden effects + associated uncertainties that come with supporting that cause), the perceived variance of the cost effectiveness of that cause will generally tend to increase. So, the more you learn two causes (say, cause A and cause B) the more likely it is that your perceived "distribution in the cost effectiveness" of cause A and cause B will blur together and the stark difference in cost effectiveness you saw before (prior to your increased knowledge) will no longer be so cut and dry.