Some charities are not just multiple times better than others, some are thousands of times better than others. But as far as I can tell, we haven’t got a good way of signaling to others what this means.
Think about when Ed Sheeran sells an album. It’s “certified platinum” then “double platinum” peaking at “certified diamond”. When people hear this it makes them sit back and say “wow, Ed sheeran is on a different level.”
When a football player is about to announce his college, he says “I’m going D1”. You become a “grandmaster” at chess. Ah, that restaurant must be good it has won two Michelin stars. That economist writing about the tragedy of the commons is great, she won a Nobel prize.
We need nomenclature that goes beyond “High impact” charity. “Cost-effective” “High impact” “Effective” are all good descriptions, but we need to come up with a rating system or some method of giving high status to the best charities (possibly based on how much $ it costs to save one life).
It’s got to be something that we can bring into the popular conscience, and it can’t be something we just narrowly assign to all of our own EA meta charities. We need journalists popularizing the term and recognizing the 3-5 super charities that save lives like no ones business. We should work with marketing teams and carefully plan what the name would be. But it’s got to confer status to the charity and people like Jay Z can gain more status by donating to it, just like he gains status by eating at Michelin star restaurants.
(excuse me if I’m not the first to outline this idea)
“But it’s got to confer status to the charity and people like Jay Z can gain more status by donating to it”—I think this brushes a good point which I’d like to see fleshed out more. On some level I’m still a bit skeptical in part because I think it’s more difficult to make these kinds of designations/measurements for charities whereas things like album statuses are very objective (i.e., a specific number of purchases/downloads) and in some cases easier to measure. Additionally, for some of those cases there is a well-established and influential organization making the determination (e.g., football leagues, FIDE for chess). I definitely think something could be done for traditional charities (e.g., global health and poverty alleviation), but it would very likely be difficult for many other charities, and it still would probably not be as widely recognized as most of the things you mentioned.
Great points. Thank you for them. Perhaps we could use a DALY/QALY measure. A charity could reach the highest status if, after randomized controlled studies, it was determined that $10 donated could give one QALY to a human (I’m making up numbers). Any charity that reached this hard to achieve threshold would be given the super-charity designation.
To make it official imagine that there’s a committee or governing body formed between charity navigator and GiveWell. 5 board members from each charity would come together and select the charities then announce the award once a year and the status would only be official for a certain amount of time or it could be removed if they dipped below a threshold.
I certainly would be interested in seeing such a system go into place—I think it would probably be beneficial—the main issue is just whether something like that is likely to happen. For example, it might be quite difficult to establish agreement between Charity Evaluator and GiveWell when it comes to the benefits of certain charities. Additionally, there may be a bit of survivor bias when it comes to organizations that have worked like FIDE, although I still think the main issue is 1) the analysis/measurement of effectiveness is difficult (requiring lots of studies vs. simply measuring album downloads/streams); and 2) the determination of effectiveness may not be widely agreed upon. That’s not to say it shouldn’t be tried, but I think that might contribute to limiting the effectiveness relative to the examples you cite.
Here’s the problem:
Some charities are not just multiple times better than others, some are thousands of times better than others. But as far as I can tell, we haven’t got a good way of signaling to others what this means.
Think about when Ed Sheeran sells an album. It’s “certified platinum” then “double platinum” peaking at “certified diamond”. When people hear this it makes them sit back and say “wow, Ed sheeran is on a different level.”
When a football player is about to announce his college, he says “I’m going D1”. You become a “grandmaster” at chess. Ah, that restaurant must be good it has won two Michelin stars. That economist writing about the tragedy of the commons is great, she won a Nobel prize.
We need nomenclature that goes beyond “High impact” charity. “Cost-effective” “High impact” “Effective” are all good descriptions, but we need to come up with a rating system or some method of giving high status to the best charities (possibly based on how much $ it costs to save one life).
It’s got to be something that we can bring into the popular conscience, and it can’t be something we just narrowly assign to all of our own EA meta charities. We need journalists popularizing the term and recognizing the 3-5 super charities that save lives like no ones business. We should work with marketing teams and carefully plan what the name would be. But it’s got to confer status to the charity and people like Jay Z can gain more status by donating to it, just like he gains status by eating at Michelin star restaurants.
(excuse me if I’m not the first to outline this idea)
“But it’s got to confer status to the charity and people like Jay Z can gain more status by donating to it”—I think this brushes a good point which I’d like to see fleshed out more. On some level I’m still a bit skeptical in part because I think it’s more difficult to make these kinds of designations/measurements for charities whereas things like album statuses are very objective (i.e., a specific number of purchases/downloads) and in some cases easier to measure. Additionally, for some of those cases there is a well-established and influential organization making the determination (e.g., football leagues, FIDE for chess). I definitely think something could be done for traditional charities (e.g., global health and poverty alleviation), but it would very likely be difficult for many other charities, and it still would probably not be as widely recognized as most of the things you mentioned.
Great points. Thank you for them. Perhaps we could use a DALY/QALY measure. A charity could reach the highest status if, after randomized controlled studies, it was determined that $10 donated could give one QALY to a human (I’m making up numbers). Any charity that reached this hard to achieve threshold would be given the super-charity designation.
To make it official imagine that there’s a committee or governing body formed between charity navigator and GiveWell. 5 board members from each charity would come together and select the charities then announce the award once a year and the status would only be official for a certain amount of time or it could be removed if they dipped below a threshold.
What do you think
I certainly would be interested in seeing such a system go into place—I think it would probably be beneficial—the main issue is just whether something like that is likely to happen. For example, it might be quite difficult to establish agreement between Charity Evaluator and GiveWell when it comes to the benefits of certain charities. Additionally, there may be a bit of survivor bias when it comes to organizations that have worked like FIDE, although I still think the main issue is 1) the analysis/measurement of effectiveness is difficult (requiring lots of studies vs. simply measuring album downloads/streams); and 2) the determination of effectiveness may not be widely agreed upon. That’s not to say it shouldn’t be tried, but I think that might contribute to limiting the effectiveness relative to the examples you cite.