I’m shocked that no one has commented on Elie Hassenfeld distributing 100% of money to GiveWell’s top charity. Even if he didn’t run GiveWell, this just seems like an extra step between giving to GiveWell. But given that one of the main arguments for the funds was to let smaller projects get funded quickly and with less overhead, giving 100% to one enormous charity with many large donors is clearly failing at a goal.
I would guess that $300k simply isn’t worth Elie’s time to distribute in small grants, given the enormous funds available via GoodVentures and even GiveWell direct and directed donations. It seems to me the obvious thing is to is have the fund managed by someone who has the time to do so, rather than make another way to give money to GiveWell.
I would guess that $300k simply isn’t worth Elie’s time to distribute in small grants, given the enormous funds available via GoodVentures and even GiveWell direct and directed donations.
This is consistent with the optionality story in the beta launch post:
If the EA Funds raises little money, they can spend little additional time allocating the EA Funds’ money but still utilize their deep subject-matter expertise in making the allocation. This reduces the chance that the EA Funds causes fund managers to use their time ineffectively and it means that the lower bound of the quality of the donations is likely to be high enough to justify donations even without knowing the eventual size of the fund.
However, I do think this suggests that—to the extent to which GiveWell is already a known and trusted institution—for global poverty in particular it’s more important to get the fund manager with the most unique relevant expertise than a fund manager with the most expertise.
It’s worth noting that it’s all pretty fungible anyway. GiveWell could have just as easily claimed the money was going toward an incubation grant and then put more incubation grant money toward AMF.
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.
Agreed—it definitely seems reasonable to me, and very consistent with GiveWell’s overall approach, that Elie sincerely believes that donating to AMF is the best use of funds.
I’m shocked that no one has commented on Elie Hassenfeld distributing 100% of money to GiveWell’s top charity. Even if he didn’t run GiveWell, this just seems like an extra step between giving to GiveWell. But given that one of the main arguments for the funds was to let smaller projects get funded quickly and with less overhead, giving 100% to one enormous charity with many large donors is clearly failing at a goal.
I would guess that $300k simply isn’t worth Elie’s time to distribute in small grants, given the enormous funds available via GoodVentures and even GiveWell direct and directed donations. It seems to me the obvious thing is to is have the fund managed by someone who has the time to do so, rather than make another way to give money to GiveWell.
This is consistent with the optionality story in the beta launch post:
However, I do think this suggests that—to the extent to which GiveWell is already a known and trusted institution—for global poverty in particular it’s more important to get the fund manager with the most unique relevant expertise than a fund manager with the most expertise.
It’s worth noting that it’s all pretty fungible anyway. GiveWell could have just as easily claimed the money was going toward an incubation grant and then put more incubation grant money toward AMF.
This seems like an excellent reason to have someone uninvolved with an existing large organization administer the fund.
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.
Or to simply say “for global poverty, we can’t do better than GiveWell so we recommend you just give them the money”.
Agreed—it definitely seems reasonable to me, and very consistent with GiveWell’s overall approach, that Elie sincerely believes that donating to AMF is the best use of funds.