Thanks for this write-up! Sounds like a bunch of cool projects.
Since 2015, over $19m has been given to high-impact charities recommended by FP. FP estimates that their research and advice played a significant role in $8m out of this total.
Do you mean that over $19m has been given to high-impact charities FP recommends by people FP talked to, but $11m might have been given to the same places anyway? That would seem to suggest a surprisingly high proportion of these people would’ve given anyway, and to the same places.
Or do you mean that the total amount given by anyone to all charities FP recommends is (presumably) around $19-20m? That would seem surprisingly little total donations, given the number of charities FP recommends, and that this is over a span of 5 years. And then that’d imply FP influenced about 40% of that total, which seems a surprisingly high proportion.
Also, do you actually just mean “high-impact charities”, or high-impact organisations/recipients more broadly? I ask because I believe some of the orgs FP recommends aren’t actually charities (e.g., in the existential risk area), though I could be wrong about that.
FP aren’t a straight forward advisory group, they have a pledge and a community, so the $19m is the total to high-impact charities within their pledger community. FP’s research team have attempted to estimate which of those donations happened as a result of FP advisory / marketing work, which is hard, and as with any self-reporting, open to becoming a KPI that ends up drifting and becoming misreported. My current view of the FP individuals that did this estimate work though is that they have high intellectual honesty and thoroughness, that they are aware of their own misincentives and when I spot-checked a number of their figures in 2018-19 they were good estimates, perhaps even on the conservative side.
Ok, so it’s that the people who’ve taken FP‘s pledge have given an estimated >$19m over 5 years to high-impact charities (which includes e.g. charities that GiveWell recommends but FP doesn’t recommend in its cause are reports), and FP estimates it influenced whether or where ~$8m of that was donated?
That makes more sense than either of the things I guessed the sentence meant. Thanks for clarifying :)
High-impact, for simplicity, (they have a very large total number of grants) is set just as the rough status quo of groups on GiveWell, funded by Open Phil, ACE charities etc., FP manage their own list and we >90% are in agreement on what is in that list. None of the largest grants in the list are groups we feel conflicted about.
In an ideal world we would of course evaluate every group their pledgers have counterfactually funded but that’s not really tractable. And we try to only use their quantitative outcomes as one of several signals as to how well they’re doing (it’s very tempting to fall into a rabbit hole of data analysis for a group with such clear and measurable first order outcomes)
I think it’s the former of the two. Regarding the last paragraph, I think this refers to high-impact recipients (I think mostly or exclusively charities). But someone from the Meta Fund could answer these questions in more detail.
Thanks for this write-up! Sounds like a bunch of cool projects.
Do you mean that over $19m has been given to high-impact charities FP recommends by people FP talked to, but $11m might have been given to the same places anyway? That would seem to suggest a surprisingly high proportion of these people would’ve given anyway, and to the same places.
Or do you mean that the total amount given by anyone to all charities FP recommends is (presumably) around $19-20m? That would seem surprisingly little total donations, given the number of charities FP recommends, and that this is over a span of 5 years. And then that’d imply FP influenced about 40% of that total, which seems a surprisingly high proportion.
Also, do you actually just mean “high-impact charities”, or high-impact organisations/recipients more broadly? I ask because I believe some of the orgs FP recommends aren’t actually charities (e.g., in the existential risk area), though I could be wrong about that.
FP aren’t a straight forward advisory group, they have a pledge and a community, so the $19m is the total to high-impact charities within their pledger community. FP’s research team have attempted to estimate which of those donations happened as a result of FP advisory / marketing work, which is hard, and as with any self-reporting, open to becoming a KPI that ends up drifting and becoming misreported. My current view of the FP individuals that did this estimate work though is that they have high intellectual honesty and thoroughness, that they are aware of their own misincentives and when I spot-checked a number of their figures in 2018-19 they were good estimates, perhaps even on the conservative side.
Ok, so it’s that the people who’ve taken FP‘s pledge have given an estimated >$19m over 5 years to high-impact charities (which includes e.g. charities that GiveWell recommends but FP doesn’t recommend in its cause are reports), and FP estimates it influenced whether or where ~$8m of that was donated?
That makes more sense than either of the things I guessed the sentence meant. Thanks for clarifying :)
High-impact, for simplicity, (they have a very large total number of grants) is set just as the rough status quo of groups on GiveWell, funded by Open Phil, ACE charities etc., FP manage their own list and we >90% are in agreement on what is in that list. None of the largest grants in the list are groups we feel conflicted about.
In an ideal world we would of course evaluate every group their pledgers have counterfactually funded but that’s not really tractable. And we try to only use their quantitative outcomes as one of several signals as to how well they’re doing (it’s very tempting to fall into a rabbit hole of data analysis for a group with such clear and measurable first order outcomes)
I think it’s the former of the two. Regarding the last paragraph, I think this refers to high-impact recipients (I think mostly or exclusively charities). But someone from the Meta Fund could answer these questions in more detail.