E.g. What is the expected effect on existential risk of donating to one of GiveWell's top charities?
I've asked myself this question several times over the last few years, but I've never put a lot of thought into it. I've always just assumed that at the very least it would not increase existential risk.
Have any analyses been done on this?
Say you have two interventions, A and B, and two outcome metrics, X and Y. You expect A will improve X by 100 units per dollar and B will improve Y by 100 units per dollar. However each intervention will have some smaller effect of uncertain sign on the other outcome metric. A will cause +1 or -1 units of Y, and B will cause +1 or -1 units of X.
It would be silly to decide for or against one of these interventions based on its second-order effect on the other outcome metric:
Cash transfers significantly relieve poverty of humans who are alive today, and are fairly efficient at doing that. They are far less efficient at helping or harming non-human animals today or increasing or reducing existential risk. Even if they have some negative effect here or there (more meat-eating, or habitat destruction, or carbon emissions) the cost of producing a comparable benefit to offset it in that dimension will be small compared to the cash transfer. E.g. an allocation of 90% GiveDirectly, and 10% to offset charities (carbon reduction, meat reduction, nuclear arms control, whatever) will wind up positive on multiple metrics.
If you have good reasons to give to poverty alleviation rather than existential risk reduction in the first place, then minor impacts on existential risk from your poverty charities are unlikely to reverse that conclusion (although you could make some smaller offsetting donations if you wanted to have a positive balance on as many moral theories as possible). It makes sense to ask how good those reasons really are and whether to switch, but not to worry too much about small second-order cross-cause effects.
ETA: As I discuss in a comment below, moral trade gives us good reasons to be reciprocally supportive with efforts to very efficiently serve different conceptions of the good with only comparatively small costs according to other conceptions.
Based on, for example, this post , would it be reasonable to say that most of the expected total impact of donating to / working on global health and development is linked to the respective long-term effects? If so, as suggested here (see "Response five: "Go longtermist""), it seems more reasonable to focus on long-termism.
I believe:
- The prior for the short-term (1st order) expected impact of (e.g.) GiveWell top charities has low variance.
- The estimate for the total expected impact of GiveWell top charities has high variance.
- The higher the variance of the es
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