I know “top charity” is in the eye of the beholder but I personally think even within the land of nonhuman-excluding non-longtermism it’s a bad idea to use “anything better than GiveDirectly = top charity” when GiveWell has a $300 million dollar unmet gap that is 6-9x as good as GiveDirectly, and their core $600 million 2022 giving season ask is all >=10x GiveDirectly.
To be clear, this isn’t the bar HLI uses. As I said in section 2:
At HLI, we think the relevant factors for recommending a charity are:
(1) cost-effectiveness is substantially better than our chosen benchmark (GiveDirectly cash transfers); and
(2) strong evidence of effectiveness.
To elaborate, we interpret “substantially” to mean “around as good as the best charity we’ve found so far” which is currently 9x GiveDirectly, but I assume the specific number will change over time.
I’m also unsure that GiveWell’s bar will generalise to other types of analyses. i.e., I think it’s very plausible that other evaluators find that cash transfers are much better than GiveWell does.
I know “top charity” is in the eye of the beholder but I personally think even within the land of nonhuman-excluding non-longtermism it’s a bad idea to use “anything better than GiveDirectly = top charity” when GiveWell has a $300 million dollar unmet gap that is 6-9x as good as GiveDirectly, and their core $600 million 2022 giving season ask is all >=10x GiveDirectly.
To be clear, this isn’t the bar HLI uses. As I said in section 2:
To elaborate, we interpret “substantially” to mean “around as good as the best charity we’ve found so far” which is currently 9x GiveDirectly, but I assume the specific number will change over time.
I was trying to propose a possible set of conditions where we could agree that it was reasonable for a charity to be recommended by someone in the EA community. I was aiming for inclusivity here and to leave room for the possibility that Founder’s Pledge may have good reasons I’m not privy to for using GiveDirectly as a bar.
I’m also unsure that GiveWell’s bar will generalise to other types of analyses. i.e., I think it’s very plausible that other evaluators find that cash transfers are much better than GiveWell does.
Agreed. For what it’s worth GWWC also uses a higher threshold than the 1x cash this post advocates.