EA - Estimating the marginal impact of outreach by Duncan Mcclements

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Estimating the marginal impact of outreach, published by Duncan Mcclements on November 30, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.This post is an entry for $5k challenge to quantify the impact of 80,000 hours' top career pathsOne of the career paths evaluated by 80000 hours is helping to build the effective altruism movement: this is currently ranked in fifth position, behind AI technical research, AI governance, biorisk and organisation entrepeneurship. This post presents a model for the marginal number of additional individuals an individual devoted to outreach would attract, and finds with very high confidence that on the margin outreach to build effective altruism further is higher impact than working on existential misk mitigation directly.Discount rate estimationThe value of outreach compared to immediately working on existential risk heavily depends on our discount rate. This is because the benefits in terms of basis points of existential risk reduced are entirely in the future for outreach (in the form of additional researchers) while immediately working on research will bring gains sooner. Two factors seem relevant for our discount rate: the probability that humanity ceases to exist before the additional researchers can have an impact and the marginal value of labour over time. The best database we are aware of for total existential risk is here: of these, the only bounded annual (or annual-equivalent assuming constant risk over time) estimates for the risk are 0.19%, 0.21%, 0.11% and 0.2%. These have a geometric mean 0f 0.17%, and a standard deviation of 0.046%, which will be used here.For the latter component, if constant returns to scale and variable exogeneity are assumed, a Cobb-Douglas production function can be taken, with Y as output, however defined, A as labour productivity, L as labour, K as capital and α as the capital elasticity of output:If differentiated with respect to labour, this then yields:Thus:So if capital allocated to EA is growing at a faster rate than labour (β>γ), our discount rate should be negative with respect to time: if labour is growing faster, it should be positive, making the simplifying assumption that EAs are the only group in the world producing moral value . Intuitively, this occurs because capital and labour are varying at some rates exogenously and we wish our level of capital per worker to be as close to constant over time as possible due to diminishing marginal returns to all inputs.Is capital or labour growing faster? This 80000 hours article from 2021 estimated at the time that the total capital allocation was growing by around 37% per year, and labour by 10-20%, which would imply deeply negative discount rates if these figures still held. However, the two largest components of the increase in capital allocated were primarily in the form of FTX and Facebook stock. With the former now worthless, and the latter having declined to less than one third of its value at the time of the writing of the article, the overall capital stock allocated to EA has plunged in value while the labour stock remains almost unaffected. Using the same methodology as the above article, noting that Dustin Moskovitz’s net worth now only stands at $6.5 billion at the time of writing, reduces the increase in funding over the past 7 years to $2.95 billion nominally (from a starting level of ~$10 billion), or a real terms increase of only $0.35 billion, or 2.8%: 0.39% annually.Capital growth will be modelled as lognormal, as a heavier tail distribution feels appropriate due to the possibility of another FTX, with mean eln(0.39) and log standard deviation of 10%, due to the potential for capital growth of 37% absent FTX's collapse and Facebook's decline in stock value. Labour growth is considerably more stable than capital growth, but sti...