I guess I didn’t bother to make a case for why something like Wikipedia provides value because I thought it was pretty obviously providing such high levels of societal surplus through its existence that the specific amount clearly dwarfs the costs of running it, irrespective of Wikimedia foundation stuff (not an argument for why one should donate money to it now but rather why whatever money it initially took to get it up and running was clearly very well spent). Same for Manifold. IIRC they probably got investments of somewhere in the ballpark of $2 million (I could be off by a lot)? This seems like a great amount to have paid to create the societal surplus that Manifold now provides!
Sure, but like… if you invested in Kalshi or Polymarket early on, then you’d have 100x-ed your return, just on a purely financial level, so that’s clearly a “good investment” from the perspective of EA orgs, since now you can turn around and put that money towards EA goals.
… why would growing the base of people making charitable donations to EA causes “negative ROI” from the perspective of EA orgs?
25 is a lot of ppl!
-
Of course impossible to directly quantify but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist! Aren’t you a forecaster :P
Manifold I think had $6M or so of investment and given the state of Manifold, clearly the market disagrees with you that this was money well spent. Perhaps they will turn things around but this is Manifold DAUs.
I agree that investing in Polymarket or Kalshi in the early days would have been a good investment. I think its really hard to make the case that they have been good for society; we basically got more sports betting.
I’m saying that if you were to compute the amount the EA community has spent on forecasting and the amount donated that got into the community through forecasting, I think the ROI would be very negative.
25 is not that many people for this and I was being very generous saying 25. I think a more fair number is like 5-10.
.
I did the forecasting stuff to show that I could do it, yes. I remain unconvinced it has been very useful to the world.
I feel like above all, I want to stress that EA dollars should meet a really high bar. You can save a child’s life for about $5000. You can get a chicken out of a cage for 10 years for about $1. You can apparently build a play money prediction market website for about $6000/DAU.
I guess I’d just like to point out that reducing the likelihood of any interstate conflict by 0.1% is probably valued at about $1 billion / year. I think the forecasting ecosystem as it stands probably does that. Unfortunately you can’t measure this in an RCT so we’ll never know I guess.
At the heart of this discussion seems to be the issue of whether it makes sense to miss out on good “investment” opportunities just because you can’t quite measure the impact.
I’m an outsider so make of this what you will but it seems to me that EA is bound to have a measurability bias to it because, if not, then it starts to look like old school charity
Obviously what you’d really want to do is give a lower bound of how much benefit society might be getting and see if the numbers work out when comparing to alternative uses
This discussion is going nowhere without that last kind of analysis imo, and even then it might just be endless but I’d rather see someone try
I guess I didn’t bother to make a case for why something like Wikipedia provides value because I thought it was pretty obviously providing such high levels of societal surplus through its existence that the specific amount clearly dwarfs the costs of running it, irrespective of Wikimedia foundation stuff (not an argument for why one should donate money to it now but rather why whatever money it initially took to get it up and running was clearly very well spent). Same for Manifold. IIRC they probably got investments of somewhere in the ballpark of $2 million (I could be off by a lot)? This seems like a great amount to have paid to create the societal surplus that Manifold now provides!
Sure, but like… if you invested in Kalshi or Polymarket early on, then you’d have 100x-ed your return, just on a purely financial level, so that’s clearly a “good investment” from the perspective of EA orgs, since now you can turn around and put that money towards EA goals.
… why would growing the base of people making charitable donations to EA causes “negative ROI” from the perspective of EA orgs?
25 is a lot of ppl!
-
Of course impossible to directly quantify but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist! Aren’t you a forecaster :P
Manifold I think had $6M or so of investment and given the state of Manifold, clearly the market disagrees with you that this was money well spent. Perhaps they will turn things around but this is Manifold DAUs.
I agree that investing in Polymarket or Kalshi in the early days would have been a good investment. I think its really hard to make the case that they have been good for society; we basically got more sports betting.
I’m saying that if you were to compute the amount the EA community has spent on forecasting and the amount donated that got into the community through forecasting, I think the ROI would be very negative.
25 is not that many people for this and I was being very generous saying 25. I think a more fair number is like 5-10.
.
I did the forecasting stuff to show that I could do it, yes. I remain unconvinced it has been very useful to the world.
I feel like above all, I want to stress that EA dollars should meet a really high bar. You can save a child’s life for about $5000. You can get a chicken out of a cage for 10 years for about $1. You can apparently build a play money prediction market website for about $6000/DAU.
I guess I’d just like to point out that reducing the likelihood of any interstate conflict by 0.1% is probably valued at about $1 billion / year. I think the forecasting ecosystem as it stands probably does that. Unfortunately you can’t measure this in an RCT so we’ll never know I guess.
At the heart of this discussion seems to be the issue of whether it makes sense to miss out on good “investment” opportunities just because you can’t quite measure the impact.
I’m an outsider so make of this what you will but it seems to me that EA is bound to have a measurability bias to it because, if not, then it starts to look like old school charity
Obviously what you’d really want to do is give a lower bound of how much benefit society might be getting and see if the numbers work out when comparing to alternative uses
This discussion is going nowhere without that last kind of analysis imo, and even then it might just be endless but I’d rather see someone try