Why Charities Usually Don't Differ Astronomically in Expected Cost-Effectiveness — EA Forum

Written by Brian Tomasik. Published by the EA Forum team as a classic repost. • Summary …

Written by Brian Tomasik. Published by the EA Forum team as a classic repost. Summary I think some in the effective-altruism movement overestimate the extent to which charities differ in their expected marginal cost-effectiveness. This piece suggests a few reasons why we shouldn't expect most charities to differ by more than hundreds of times. In fact, I suspect many charities differ by at most ~10 to ~100 times, and within a given field, the multipliers are probably less than a factor of ~5. These multipliers may be positive or negative, i.e., some charities have negative expected net…

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