OpenPhil might be in a position to expand EA’s expected impact if it added a cause area that allowed for more speculative investments in Global Health & Development.
My impression is that Open Philanthropy’s Global Health and Development team already does this? For example, OP has focus areas on Global aid policy, Scientific research and South Asian air quality, areas which are inherently risky/uncertain.
They have also take a hit based approach philosophically, and this is what distinguishes them from GiveWell—see e.g.
Hits. We are explicitly pursuing a hits-based approach to philanthropy with much of this work, and accordingly might expect just one or two “hits” from our portfolio to carry the whole. In particular, if one or two of our large science grants ended up 10x more cost-effective than GiveWell’s top charities, our portfolio to date would cumulatively come out ahead. In fact, the dollar-weighted average of the 33 BOTECs we collected above is (modestly) above the 1,000x bar, reflecting our ex ante assessment of that possibility. But the concerns about the informational value of those BOTECs remain, and most of our grants seems noticeably less likely to deliver such “hits”.
My impression is that Open Philanthropy’s Global Health and Development team already does this? For example, OP has focus areas on Global aid policy, Scientific research and South Asian air quality, areas which are inherently risky/uncertain.
They have also take a hit based approach philosophically, and this is what distinguishes them from GiveWell—see e.g.
[Reposting my comment here from previous version]