When I met Holden Karnofsky (the executive director of Givewell) at the 2014 Effective Altruism Summit, I asked him if Givewell ever intended to consult or revamp charities to become more effective rather than just evaluating and recommending already effective charities. He said no. His reason for this is because he believes it’s substantially more difficult to create an effective charity than evaluate existing ones. I’m inclined to agree with him, as the risks and rewards of creating a charity are spread across the whole non-profit world, not jeopardizing the potential value of Givewell’s marginal resources. Note I just mean I now think it makes sense for Givewell not to go into consulting, but I still think others need try to create effective charities.
Note Mr. Karnofsky’s statement reflects the position of Givewell’s leadership, but this doesn’t mean other effective altruists working for, aligned with, or near Givewell couldn’t get involved in such a project. Givewell already values independent thinking among its employees, exemplified by their annual blogs about where each of its research employees intends to donate and why.
I’m inclined to agree with Holden for a number of reasons. First and foremost being that this isn’t really what GiveWell does. They are very good at what they do, which is evaluate existing charities; while I see the tie-in with knowing how a good charity is run, it is a far cry from making organizational changes. Which is the other reason I agree with him, doing this is hard. Like really, really, substantially hard.
However I think hard and ‘not worth doing’ are very different things. I also agree that CEA or EA Ventures would be more appropriate venues to incubate a testable idea around this. After speaking with Kerry at CEA about this he agrees that while this is very exciting and something that would be great, no one yet seems to have a good answer for how to go about doing this. I think the next step is more asking lots and lots of people how they would go about doing this, what the very first change would, should, or could be.
When I met Holden Karnofsky (the executive director of Givewell) at the 2014 Effective Altruism Summit, I asked him if Givewell ever intended to consult or revamp charities to become more effective rather than just evaluating and recommending already effective charities. He said no. His reason for this is because he believes it’s substantially more difficult to create an effective charity than evaluate existing ones. I’m inclined to agree with him, as the risks and rewards of creating a charity are spread across the whole non-profit world, not jeopardizing the potential value of Givewell’s marginal resources. Note I just mean I now think it makes sense for Givewell not to go into consulting, but I still think others need try to create effective charities.
Note Mr. Karnofsky’s statement reflects the position of Givewell’s leadership, but this doesn’t mean other effective altruists working for, aligned with, or near Givewell couldn’t get involved in such a project. Givewell already values independent thinking among its employees, exemplified by their annual blogs about where each of its research employees intends to donate and why.
I’m inclined to agree with Holden for a number of reasons. First and foremost being that this isn’t really what GiveWell does. They are very good at what they do, which is evaluate existing charities; while I see the tie-in with knowing how a good charity is run, it is a far cry from making organizational changes. Which is the other reason I agree with him, doing this is hard. Like really, really, substantially hard.
However I think hard and ‘not worth doing’ are very different things. I also agree that CEA or EA Ventures would be more appropriate venues to incubate a testable idea around this. After speaking with Kerry at CEA about this he agrees that while this is very exciting and something that would be great, no one yet seems to have a good answer for how to go about doing this. I think the next step is more asking lots and lots of people how they would go about doing this, what the very first change would, should, or could be.