On the other hand, it does seem worthwhile to funnel money through different intermediaries sometimes if only to independently confirm that the obvious things are obvious, and we probably don’t want to advocate contrarianism for contrarianism’s sake. If Elie had given the money elsewhere, that would have been strong evidence that the other thing was valuable and underfunded relative to GW top charities (and also worrying evidence about GiveWell’s ability to implement its founders’ values). Since he didn’t, that’s at least weak evidence that AMF is the best global poverty funding opportunity we know about.
Overall I think it’s good that Elie didn’t feel the need to justify his participation by doing a bunch of makework. This is still evidence that channeling this through Elie probably gives a false impression of additional optimizing power, but I think that should have been our strong prior anyhow.
If Elie had given the money elsewhere, that would have been strong evidence that the other thing was valuable and underfunded relative to GW top charities.
Only if GiveWell and the EA Fund are both supposed to be perfect expressions of Elie’s values. GiveWell has a fairly specific mission which includes not just high expected value but high certainty (compared to the rest of the field, which is a low bar). EA Funds was explicitly supposed to be more experimental. Like you say below, if organizers don’t think you can beat GiveWell, encourage donating to GiveWell.
On the other hand, it does seem worthwhile to funnel money through different intermediaries sometimes if only to independently confirm that the obvious things are obvious, and we probably don’t want to advocate contrarianism for contrarianism’s sake. If Elie had given the money elsewhere, that would have been strong evidence that the other thing was valuable and underfunded relative to GW top charities (and also worrying evidence about GiveWell’s ability to implement its founders’ values). Since he didn’t, that’s at least weak evidence that AMF is the best global poverty funding opportunity we know about.
Overall I think it’s good that Elie didn’t feel the need to justify his participation by doing a bunch of makework. This is still evidence that channeling this through Elie probably gives a false impression of additional optimizing power, but I think that should have been our strong prior anyhow.
Only if GiveWell and the EA Fund are both supposed to be perfect expressions of Elie’s values. GiveWell has a fairly specific mission which includes not just high expected value but high certainty (compared to the rest of the field, which is a low bar). EA Funds was explicitly supposed to be more experimental. Like you say below, if organizers don’t think you can beat GiveWell, encourage donating to GiveWell.