FYI thanks for all the helpful comments here — I promptly got covid and haven't had a chance to respond 😅

This is a really nice idea, thanks!

Here’s a puzzle I’ve thought about a few times recently:

The impact of an activity ($I$) is due to two factors, $X$ and $Y$. Those factors combine multiplicatively to produce impact. Examples include:

• The funding of an organization and the people working at the org
• A manager of a team who acts as a lever on the work of their reports
• The EA Forum acts as a lever on top of the efforts of the authors
• A product manager joins a team of engineers

Let’s assume in all of these scenarios that you are only one of the players in the situation, and you can only control your own actions.

From a counterfactual analysis, if you can increase your contribution by 10%, then you increase the impact by 10%, end of story.

From a Shapley Value perspective, it’s a bit more complicated, but we can start with a prior that you split your impact evenly with the other players.

Both these perspectives have a lot going for them! The counterfactual analysis has important correspondences to reality. If you do 10% better at your job the world gets $0.1I$ better. Shapley Values prevent the scenario where the multiplicative impact causes the involved agents to collectively contribute too much.

I notice myself feeling relatively more philosophically comfortable running with the Shapely Value analysis in the scenario where I feel aligned with the other players in the game. And potentially the Shapley Value approach downsides go down if I actually run the math (Fake edit: I ran a really hacky guess as to how I’d calculate this using this calculator and it wasn’t that helpful).

But I don’t feel 100% bought-in to the Shapley Value approach, and think there’s a value in paying attention to the counterfactuals. My unprincipled compromise approach would be to take some weighted geometric mean and call it a day.

Interested in comments.

I think it's a pretty important distinction that "EA" is a question which has no CEO, while the Centre for Effective Altruism does. I recommend changing the title here.

I agree with you, and so does our issue tracker. Sadly, it does seem a bit hard. Tagging @peterhartree as a person who might be able to tell me that it's less hard than I think.

I worked with Sam for 4 years and would recommend the experience. He's an absolute blast to talk tech with, and a great human.

Some good kabbalistic significance to our issue tracker, but I'm not sure how.

First, a note: I have heard recommendations to try to lower the number of issues. I've never understood it except as a way to pretend like you don't have bugs. For sure some of those issues are stale and out of date, but quite a few are probably live but ultimately very edge-case and unimportant bugs, or feature requests we probably won't get to but could be good. I don't think it's a good use of time to prune it, and most of the approaches I've seen companies take is to auto-close old bugs, which strikes me as disingenuous.

In any case, we have a fairly normal process of setting OKRs for our larger projects, and tiny features / bugfixes get triaged into a backlog that we look at when planning our weekly sprints. The triage process done in our asana and is intentionally not visible publicly so we can feel comfortable marking something as low priority without worrying about needing to argue about it.

Thanks for the report. We currently do the second, which isn't ideal to be sure. If someone redrafts and republishes after a post has been up for a while, an admin will have to adjust the published date manually. This happens surprisingly infrequently relative to what I might've expected, so we haven't prioritized improving that.