Effectiveness is a conjunction of multipliers

Abstract

Ana is a hypothetical junior software engineer in Silicon Valley making $150k/year. Every year, she spends 10% of her income to anonymously buy socks for her colleagues. Most people would agree that Ana is being altruistic, but not being particularly efficient about it. If utility is logarithmic in income, Ana can 40x her impact by giving the socks to a local homeless person instead who has an income of $5000. But in the EA community, we’ve noticed further multipliers.