[Content warning: discussion of exercise.]
Effectuation is a concept I recently discovered and I think it’s really interesting.
One way of creating plans is though causation. In this context, causation involves identifying a goal and then looking for the resources that will help you achieve it. For instance, you might identify that you want to run a five-minute mile. Then you would develop your training schedule, come up with a diet plan you can live with, pick out a kickass pair of running shoes, and so on. A lot of people I know are big fans of reasoning more through causation, which they call being agentic.
However, some research on successful entrepreneurs shows that they tend to use a different strategy, called effectuation. Effectuation involves identifying your resources and then choosing a goal that you can reach with your resources. For instance, effectuation is saying “well, I have this bench press and squat rack… I should start weightlifting!”
Now, you might be thinking “why the hell would I ever use effectuation? That’s ridiculous!” However, it turns out that effectuation tends to work better under conditions of uncertainty. If you’re founding a company, it can be genuinely difficult to know whether, say, a medical startup or a business-to-business startup is a better idea; there are a lot of unknowns and unknown unknowns, and even your best guess is going to be really uncertain. On the other hand, it’s very easy to figure out whether you, personally, are better at doing a medical startup or a business-to-business startup: maybe you have a medical degree or a lot of contacts in a particular industry. And since goals you already have the resources for are more likely to succeed than those you don’t [citation needed], effectuation can help you choose a path that’s likely to succeed even when you’re uncertain.
One thing that didn’t come up in the research but that I do think is important is that your effectuation should be guided by some sort of broader meta-goal: for instance, you might want to get in shape, have a strong marriage, improve the world, be happy, or whatever. It’s quite obvious why that didn’t come up in the research: to a first approximation, every entrepreneur has the meta-goal ‘earn lots of money.’ However, within your extremely broad goal, I think in a lot of situations it makes sense not to ask yourself “what is the best way to reach this broad goal?” but instead to ask yourself “what resources do I have and how can I use them to achieve my broad goal?”
Thing of Things 
It’s funny that you add a content warning tag because of discussion of exercise but not because of discussion about diaper fetish (in the previous post). I don’t really mind you writing about either topic (or any topic for that matter), but I can certainly see diaper fetish putting off way more people than exercising.
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It’s not about putting off people, it’s about potentially triggering people with an exercise-related eating disorder. As far as I am aware, relatively few people have mental illnesses triggered by the mention of diaper fetishes.
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(cw: effective altruism, scrupulosity)
This strategy has tons of implications for effective altruism, and effectuation-style thinking might be the reason why people go in for such a diversity of charity, regardless of what “helps the most”. You might think, for example, that donating to Give Directly or others of GiveWell’s top charities are the best thing to do on an absolute scale, but they’re not necessarily so relatively good to discount the comparative advantage you have in a certain other area.
One more reason to let GiveWell’s focus on advocating to billionaires, I guess.
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Unpack or elaborate on that a little bit more, please?
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Holden talks about this, among other things, in his keynote at the 2013 EA summit. In particular, he criticized the thought pattern of “this is the most important problem, so that’s what I’m going to do.” The problem of being massively overconfident about “this is the most important problem” aside, this thinking grossly ignores comparative advantage. For example, pretend for a moment that AMF is the most effective charity possible. This doesn’t imply that it’s a good idea to go work for AMF, or even earn to give to AMF. If you’re, say, a university professor, then you’re probably a lot more effective slipping the occasional (relevant) references to GiveWell/AMF into your lectures, thereby leading students in that direction. Or if you’re Paul Graham, and don’t have it in you to do another startup to make a bunch of money, you could advise some EA folks into making a better startup, thereby making Good Ventures #2. Or if you have a popular internet blog, you sometimes write about EA whenever you have something interesting to say about it, and maybe convince some of your readers to give. Or maybe you don’t have any special skills or talents, so you find someone interested in donating to EA whose time is extremely valuable and are a really awesome personal assistant for them, thereby allowing them to make a bunch more money to shove AMF’s way. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
As an alternative, Holden suggested that EAs either do things they already have skills for—preferably with short feedback loops, since such feedback is a public good and stuff—or gain general skills, particularly if you’re young.
I won’t put words in Tricky’s mouth, but the diversity of EA charity might be a result of EAs just having different comparative advantages. Certainly a public health type person would have a different approach than a nutrition researcher (bed nets/deworming vs idione/vitamin A supplementation), both of them valuable. Going ahead and making these charities (the vitamin A one is one GiveWell would like made, especially since it seems they’ll have exhausted their current charities’ room for more funding in the next few years) is probably better than doing something else and donating to existing GiveWell charities. Similarly, it’s probably more impactful for someone mostly through tenure track to get a low-paying job (relative to their skill) as a professor and influence the next generation than go into industry and donate directly, even if that would enable them, themself, to donate more.
Kind of as a result of this, most people’s comparative advantage isn’t in making a boatload of money to donate. If you look at GiveWell’s money moved (just recently updated), Good Ventures (billionaire) donated more than everyone else. Excluding Good Ventures, donors donating >$1M donated more than everyone else combined. Hence, unless you’re extremely affluent or in a position to be well into the 1% highest earners, your comparative advantage is almost certainly not in earning to give.
Holden’s keynote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_Wh00Az-3w
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Isn’t most people’s decision making always a combination of these two processes? One keeps a mental list of resources and one of goals then tries to match up what resources can be put to what end. When one really wants to achieve a goal or has far more of a resource than they know what to do with, one process or other is emphasised, but both are taking place. (Of course, it is useful to have words for both concepts.)
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I think the real lesson is not to lose sight of your broad, ultimate goals in pursuit of narrow goals. Once you allow for effectuation to take goals into account (which is what you are doing, even if you call them “meta-goals”), then it is not an alternative to causation-based planning. Rather, it looks like what you call “causation” is backward search using causation and “effectuation” is forward search using causation.
Forward search is perfectly goal-oriented! Chess programs function through forward search without backward search at all. I feel like it is a straw man against goal-oriented behavior to portray “meta-goal” based effectuation as an alternative to it.
For example, if you use the same broad goal of “improve fitness” for both, it’s not like backward-causation will have you working on your mile-time if it’s the winter in Minnesota and you don’t have access to a treadmill.
To be clear, forward search is perfectly good. I just think that treating it as an alternative to causal reasoning is clap-trap that arises from some business self-help guy. Fixation on a narrow goal (i.e., not even close to a terminal value) or failure to look at your resources to pick narrow goals are mistakes within a bog-standard, causation-based, consequentialist paradigm.
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//For example, if you use the same broad goal of “improve fitness” for both, it’s not like backward-causation will have you working on your mile-time if it’s the winter in Minnesota and you don’t have access to a treadmill.//
Some people *will* decide to go to the gym, though, or maybe even buy a treadmill if they are feeling optimistic about their chances of following through.
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1. People with access to gyms containing treadmills have access to treadmills.
2. That wasn’t intended as a precise statement, as is so often the case of statements that begin with “for example”. The point was that there is no reason for planning by backward-causation to lead one from “improve fitness” to “improve mile-time” when that’s much worse than the other options. The “improve mile time” vs “lift weights” in Ozy’s post arises as a contrast of “narrow goal” versus “broad goal”, not as a contrast of “causation” versus “effectuation”.
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And people with access to a shoe store that sells running shoes technically have access to running shoes.
It seems that Ozy is talking about resources that are immediately available as opposed to those that require additional effort, whether that be going to the store to buy running shoes or signing up for a new gym membership.
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I doubt very much that “effectuation” means that you don’t purchase goods or services, since the concept is originally about entrepreneurship, and very few entrepreneurs start businesses without purchasing goods or services.
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Then some sort of problem is going on, because buying running shoes is specifically contrasted with already having a set of weights to use.
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Check this shit out
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