Thanks for detailing this aspect of EA. I think much of the deference culture is driven by early EA orgs like GiveWell, as you mention. There is a tendency to map the strong deference that GiveWell merits in global health onto other cause areas where it may not apply. For instance, GWWC recommends giving to several funds in different cause areas. The presentation suggests that funds are roughly equal in quality for their respective cause areas. GiveWell has about ~5x more staff than Animal Charity Evaluators, ~10x+ more staff compared to the EA Infrastructure Fund, and ~10x+ more staff compared to Founders Pledge’s climate team. To the extent that a larger team size means more research hours and more research hours means better funding decisions, there is a significant difference in funding quality among the different fund recommendations. This difference isn’t communicated in public-facing EA media like the GWWC webpage and videos.
As someone who is an expert in a cause area where the EA fund has comparatively little analytical capacity (climate change mitigation), I find the deference and marketing of the climate fund as the most effective giving option a continual source of frustration. I’ve written about that here and here. I’m also worried about people mapping weak deference onto causes where they should have greater deference: many people early in their EA engagement care about climate change as a cause area. If they have some level of expertise, they may find the climate fund recommendations underwhelming and then incorrectly assume funds in other causes areas have similarly low levels of research behind them. There may be some attrition in getting more people more involved in EA because of this, though it is a tiny niche. I don’t think the answer to the comparative deference problem is to do something like delist fund options from the GWWC page. But we do need some way to communicate the differential level of rigor.
Thanks for detailing this aspect of EA. I think much of the deference culture is driven by early EA orgs like GiveWell, as you mention. There is a tendency to map the strong deference that GiveWell merits in global health onto other cause areas where it may not apply. For instance, GWWC recommends giving to several funds in different cause areas. The presentation suggests that funds are roughly equal in quality for their respective cause areas. GiveWell has about ~5x more staff than Animal Charity Evaluators, ~10x+ more staff compared to the EA Infrastructure Fund, and ~10x+ more staff compared to Founders Pledge’s climate team. To the extent that a larger team size means more research hours and more research hours means better funding decisions, there is a significant difference in funding quality among the different fund recommendations. This difference isn’t communicated in public-facing EA media like the GWWC webpage and videos.
As someone who is an expert in a cause area where the EA fund has comparatively little analytical capacity (climate change mitigation), I find the deference and marketing of the climate fund as the most effective giving option a continual source of frustration. I’ve written about that here and here. I’m also worried about people mapping weak deference onto causes where they should have greater deference: many people early in their EA engagement care about climate change as a cause area. If they have some level of expertise, they may find the climate fund recommendations underwhelming and then incorrectly assume funds in other causes areas have similarly low levels of research behind them. There may be some attrition in getting more people more involved in EA because of this, though it is a tiny niche. I don’t think the answer to the comparative deference problem is to do something like delist fund options from the GWWC page. But we do need some way to communicate the differential level of rigor.