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I wouldn't argue there's a difference except that "EA" taken as a whole probably has way less overhead than Susan G. Komen (for example). If (if!) a breast canc
by throwaway1326 4y ago
I wouldn't argue there's a difference except that "EA" taken as a whole probably has way less overhead than Susan G. Komen (for example). If (if!) a breast cancer charity running ads drastically increases the amount of money they get in donations, that's probably a good thing up until the point that the marginal benefit to breast cancer researchers of the charity running more ads outweighs the marginal benefit to breast cancer researchers of just getting the money. If $1 in ads consistently brought in $2 of donations, it'd seem like the right thing to do to run a ton of ads, even if we agree running ads about breast cancer or AI or malaria nets or tickets to the opera for inner city youth is not intrinsically valuable.
I think I can speak for EAs when I say overhead is not the greatest metric by which to judge a charity[1]. I understand why it's an intuitive one, and overhead is probably correlated with measures of effectiveness, but if your targets are concrete enough you can just... actually measure effectiveness.
[1]: https://blog.givewell.org/2009/12/01/the-worst-way-to-pick-a-charity/ https://blog.givewell.org/2009/12/01/the-worst-way-to-pick-a...
- Jweb_Guru 4y agoAll of this sounds, to put it bluntly, like a lot of hemming and hawing to get around the fact that your favorite charity organization just spent $15 million on a castle.
- throwaway1326 4y agoYeah I can't really defend that. But this was probably how they convinced themselves it was "effective".