Thanks for conducting this impact assessment, for sharing this draft with us before publishing it, and for your help with GWWC’s own impact evaluation! A few high-level comments (as a researcher at GWWC):
First, just reiterating that we appreciate others checking our assumptions and sharing their views on them.
As other commenters have discussed, we don’t think it makes sense to only account for our influence on longtermist donations. We’d like to do a better job explaining our views here, which we see as similar to Open Philanthropy’s worldview diversification.
I also appreciate your acknowledgements of the limitations of your approach (some of which are similar to ours) in that you have not modelled our potential indirect benefits—which may well be the driver of our impact.
Regarding the difference between how you have modelled the value of the GWWC Pledge versus how we did so:
As a quick-summary for others: the key difference is that GWWC’s impact evaluation worked out the value of the pledge by looking at GWWC Pledgers as an overall cohort, and looking at the average amount donated by Pledgers each year, over their Pledge tenure. The analysis in this evaluation (explained in the post) looks at Pledgers as individuals and models them each in turn, and takes the average of those models. (Please correct me if I’m wrong here!).
Consequently, this approach uses a ‘richer’ set of information, though I also see it as requiring more assumptions (that the rules for extrapolating each individual Pledgers’ giving are in fact correct). Whereas our approach uses less information, but only assumes that—on average—past data will be indicative of future data. I’d be interested in whether you think this is a fair summary.
I have some intuitions that GWWC’s approach is more robust, but that this one—if done well—could potentially be more valid. They’re just intuitions though, and I haven’t thought too deeply about it.
I find it interesting that this approach appears to lead to more optimistic conclusions abut GWWC’s impact (despite the way it ‘bounds’ how any individual Pledgers’ giving can be extrapolated over time).
Thanks for conducting this impact assessment, for sharing this draft with us before publishing it, and for your help with GWWC’s own impact evaluation! A few high-level comments (as a researcher at GWWC):
First, just reiterating that we appreciate others checking our assumptions and sharing their views on them.
As other commenters have discussed, we don’t think it makes sense to only account for our influence on longtermist donations. We’d like to do a better job explaining our views here, which we see as similar to Open Philanthropy’s worldview diversification.
I also appreciate your acknowledgements of the limitations of your approach (some of which are similar to ours) in that you have not modelled our potential indirect benefits—which may well be the driver of our impact.
Regarding the difference between how you have modelled the value of the GWWC Pledge versus how we did so:
As a quick-summary for others: the key difference is that GWWC’s impact evaluation worked out the value of the pledge by looking at GWWC Pledgers as an overall cohort, and looking at the average amount donated by Pledgers each year, over their Pledge tenure. The analysis in this evaluation (explained in the post) looks at Pledgers as individuals and models them each in turn, and takes the average of those models. (Please correct me if I’m wrong here!).
Consequently, this approach uses a ‘richer’ set of information, though I also see it as requiring more assumptions (that the rules for extrapolating each individual Pledgers’ giving are in fact correct). Whereas our approach uses less information, but only assumes that—on average—past data will be indicative of future data. I’d be interested in whether you think this is a fair summary.
I have some intuitions that GWWC’s approach is more robust, but that this one—if done well—could potentially be more valid. They’re just intuitions though, and I haven’t thought too deeply about it.
I find it interesting that this approach appears to lead to more optimistic conclusions abut GWWC’s impact (despite the way it ‘bounds’ how any individual Pledgers’ giving can be extrapolated over time).
Thanks again for your work!
Hi Michael,
I think that is a great summary, thanks!