Hi Michael—this is Isabel Arjmand, Special Projects Officer at GiveWell. Thank you for the feedback and for HLI’s critique of deworming, which played a role in inspiring this contest!
We designed this contest to incentivize critiques that are relatively straightforward for us to evaluate and particularly likely to change our mind about upcoming allocation decisions. This is our first time running a contest like this, so we wanted to keep the scope manageable. We may run future contests with different or broader prompts.
A bit more color on why we’re keeping the contest’s scope to our existing cost-effectiveness analyses:
We believe critiques of our existing cost-effectiveness analyses will be relatively straightforward for us to review, as opposed to broader critiques, such as those that suggest we take an entirely different approach to recommending giving opportunities. We anticipate that having this well-defined scope will make it easier for us to compare and give due consideration to all entries with our current research capacity (which we are hoping to expand!).
We’re getting ready to make some large decisions about how to allocate funding across the programs we currently support at the end of the year. This contest is designed to solicit the feedback that we think has the greatest potential to improve those upcoming decisions; excellent entries could meaningfully change how we allocate funds, leading to more lives saved or improved. Broader critiques or proposals for wholly new approaches would be unlikely to influence this year’s decisions, given how much vetting we put into our allocations and how little time remains before they are finalized.
Outside of this contest, we welcome feedback on all aspects of our work, and we’re glad to receive those at any time via email, as blog comments on our open threads, or here on the EA Forum.
We appreciate your continued engagement on subjective well-being, particularly the useful feedback you provided on our draft reports explaining why we’re not as optimistic about subjective well-being measures and Interpersonal Psychotherapy Groups as you are. We’re still planning to publish those reports, but we’re behind the timeline we originally laid out. Thanks for your patience with this!
Hi Michael—this is Isabel Arjmand, Special Projects Officer at GiveWell. Thank you for the feedback and for HLI’s critique of deworming, which played a role in inspiring this contest!
We designed this contest to incentivize critiques that are relatively straightforward for us to evaluate and particularly likely to change our mind about upcoming allocation decisions. This is our first time running a contest like this, so we wanted to keep the scope manageable. We may run future contests with different or broader prompts.
A bit more color on why we’re keeping the contest’s scope to our existing cost-effectiveness analyses:
We believe critiques of our existing cost-effectiveness analyses will be relatively straightforward for us to review, as opposed to broader critiques, such as those that suggest we take an entirely different approach to recommending giving opportunities. We anticipate that having this well-defined scope will make it easier for us to compare and give due consideration to all entries with our current research capacity (which we are hoping to expand!).
We’re getting ready to make some large decisions about how to allocate funding across the programs we currently support at the end of the year. This contest is designed to solicit the feedback that we think has the greatest potential to improve those upcoming decisions; excellent entries could meaningfully change how we allocate funds, leading to more lives saved or improved. Broader critiques or proposals for wholly new approaches would be unlikely to influence this year’s decisions, given how much vetting we put into our allocations and how little time remains before they are finalized.
Outside of this contest, we welcome feedback on all aspects of our work, and we’re glad to receive those at any time via email, as blog comments on our open threads, or here on the EA Forum.
We appreciate your continued engagement on subjective well-being, particularly the useful feedback you provided on our draft reports explaining why we’re not as optimistic about subjective well-being measures and Interpersonal Psychotherapy Groups as you are. We’re still planning to publish those reports, but we’re behind the timeline we originally laid out. Thanks for your patience with this!