Surely the comparison of a marginal dollar vs. [total-impact]/[nr of people] is going to be misleading here? If we compared with [total-impact]/[nr of dollars] that’d be more one-to-one but also not what we care about. We’d want to compare the marginal dollar with a marginal person.
We can talk about Lukas’s value on the margin, which is probably slightly less than total impact * Lukas’s share of the credit due to diminishing returns in the size of the field but that’s not obvious
We can talk about causing new people, who tend to add much less value than average, to join the field
The correct concept here is the former, I think, since we’re talking about trading off between money and work by great people.
I certainly agree with the conceptual point, but it seems like I believe in way faster DMR in the size of the field than you seem to believe in. Like, I think a 50⁄50 gamble to eliminate the field or triple the size seems bad to me, whereas a 50⁄50 gamble to either double or halve it feels kind of unclear if it’s worth it or not. So feels closer to log than linear to me, although I think it’s probably somewhat less steeply diminishing than log.
(I would also have thought that the value of a year of the AI safety nonprofit ecosystem is higher than 50B though, so not at all clear I’m disagreeing with your bottom-line. And probably there’s some correlation here, where money is more valuable if there’s less steeply DMR to the size of the field.)
Surely the comparison of a marginal dollar vs. [total-impact]/[nr of people] is going to be misleading here? If we compared with [total-impact]/[nr of dollars] that’d be more one-to-one but also not what we care about. We’d want to compare the marginal dollar with a marginal person.
Yes but be careful about “marginal person.”
We can talk about Lukas’s value on the margin, which is probably slightly less than total impact * Lukas’s share of the credit due to diminishing returns in the size of the field but that’s not obvious
We can talk about causing new people, who tend to add much less value than average, to join the field
The correct concept here is the former, I think, since we’re talking about trading off between money and work by great people.
I certainly agree with the conceptual point, but it seems like I believe in way faster DMR in the size of the field than you seem to believe in. Like, I think a 50⁄50 gamble to eliminate the field or triple the size seems bad to me, whereas a 50⁄50 gamble to either double or halve it feels kind of unclear if it’s worth it or not. So feels closer to log than linear to me, although I think it’s probably somewhat less steeply diminishing than log.
(I would also have thought that the value of a year of the AI safety nonprofit ecosystem is higher than 50B though, so not at all clear I’m disagreeing with your bottom-line. And probably there’s some correlation here, where money is more valuable if there’s less steeply DMR to the size of the field.)