This sounds really great to me. I love the idea of having more RCTs in the EA sphere. I would definitely record how much they are giving 1 year later.
I also think it’s worth having a hold out set. People can pre-register the list of friends, than a random number generator can be used to randomly selects some friends not to make an explicit GWWC pitch to. It’s possible many of the friends/contacts who join GWWC and start donating are those who have already been exposed to EA ideas before over a long period of time, and the effect size of the direct GWWC pitch isn’t as large as it would appear. Having a hold out set would account for this. With a hold out set, CEA wouldn’t have to worry about who they contact. The holdout set would take care of this and make the estimate of the treatment effect unbiased.
I don’t think there will be enough datapoints to do this. But if there are enough people willing to be in this experiment and they think they have a lot of friends they’ll be willing to contact, I will include a holdout set.
This sounds really great to me. I love the idea of having more RCTs in the EA sphere. I would definitely record how much they are giving 1 year later.
I also think it’s worth having a hold out set. People can pre-register the list of friends, than a random number generator can be used to randomly selects some friends not to make an explicit GWWC pitch to. It’s possible many of the friends/contacts who join GWWC and start donating are those who have already been exposed to EA ideas before over a long period of time, and the effect size of the direct GWWC pitch isn’t as large as it would appear. Having a hold out set would account for this. With a hold out set, CEA wouldn’t have to worry about who they contact. The holdout set would take care of this and make the estimate of the treatment effect unbiased.
I don’t think there will be enough datapoints to do this. But if there are enough people willing to be in this experiment and they think they have a lot of friends they’ll be willing to contact, I will include a holdout set.