What a great post, strong-upvoted. I did a shallow investigation on this topic as part of AIM’s research training program back in the day and you wrote about this better than I could’ve.
Tangentially:
In a subsequent post, I’ll take a stab at an education-focused CEA, which GiveWell has not yet done.
Keen to read this, and also what you think of Founders Pledge’s take on this, where Vadim Albinsky uses GiveWell’s approach in handling less-than-ideal evidence to argue that
… the combined evidence for the income impacts of interventions that boost test scores is much stronger than the evidence GiveWell has used to value the income effects of fighting malaria, deworming, or making vaccines, vitamin A, and iodine more available. Even after applying very conservative discounts to expected effect sizes to account for the applicability of the evidence to potential funding opportunities, we find the best education interventions to be in the same range of cost-effectiveness as GiveWell’s top charities.
and then proceeds to identify and evaluate Imagine Worldwide as a potential top charity (just below TaRL Africa in cost-effectiveness).
Thanks! That looks like a very compelling post. The CEA I’m working on is on the much narrower topic of giving students glasses (sorry if that wasn’t clear), but maybe I’ll try to take a critical look at their analysis once I wrap up with the glasses.
What a great post, strong-upvoted. I did a shallow investigation on this topic as part of AIM’s research training program back in the day and you wrote about this better than I could’ve.
Tangentially:
Keen to read this, and also what you think of Founders Pledge’s take on this, where Vadim Albinsky uses GiveWell’s approach in handling less-than-ideal evidence to argue that
and then proceeds to identify and evaluate Imagine Worldwide as a potential top charity (just below TaRL Africa in cost-effectiveness).
Thanks! That looks like a very compelling post. The CEA I’m working on is on the much narrower topic of giving students glasses (sorry if that wasn’t clear), but maybe I’ll try to take a critical look at their analysis once I wrap up with the glasses.
Ah gotcha, I misunderstood you then, no worries and please don’t feel obligated to take a look.
Turns out I really couldn’t do a CEA without addressing that post (at least not one GiveWell would be interested in) :)
So thanks for the heads up! I ended up writing a semi-response to it: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GA3FNLFj8hu5HfaNh/gatekept-why-givewell-s-highly-educated-workforce-reasonably