Thanks everyone for your interesting in GWWC research.
The purpose of GWWC doing research is fourfold:
Find very effective charities/interventions and add to Givewell’s research.
In the past we might have influenced Givewell’s recommendations—see: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-ky1zIxhwx_aUZiY3ZfOWplTXd2ODF5aEt2aUJOU2dKWTFV/view?usp=sharing
Our niche is to specialize on global poverty charities / interventions and we hope to continue to add to the knowledge base in this area. For instance, this means that we likely will not do much in-depth research on Marijuana legalization in Vermont. We also focus more on intervention effectiveness than operations and the financials of charities (even though we do shallow investigations on this). Givewell now has 18 Full-time staff (and is expanding), but many work on the Open Philanthropy project and not that many on their top charities. There are still relatively few independent evaluators in world working on the intersection of effectiveness under ideal trial conditions (efficacy) and the effectiveness under large-scale programme conditions (effectiveness), and so I think it’s good to have more people working on this.
It’s also good to have some independent evaluation and peer-review of Givewell’s research, even in the case of highly transparent organisations such as Givewell
Provide supervision for global poverty / effectiveness research projects to highly motivated students, in order to deeply involve them with EA.
Finally, if we want to scale and grow roughly exponentially to eventually consistently move many millions to effective charities every year, it’s important to have in-house expertise to inform and fact-check our outreach and marketing, and make us credible when recommending charities to our members.
It’s also good to have some independent evaluation and peer-review of Givewell’s research, even in the case of highly transparent organisations such as Givewell
In the past, where has this led? Has your peer review uncovered any errors GiveWell has made? Or has it been more conceptual disagreements like the one over GiveDirectly?
I don’t think there’s a clear cut-off between conceptual and empirical disagreements, and I think it’s really important for us to highlight agreement rather than disagreement. That’s partly because it’s easy to give yourself a pretext for not donating / not donating to charities you aren’t personally connected with, so we don’t want to give people the impression of argument where there isn’t any (think of people citing disagreements over vaccines causing autism, or over climate change, when really scientists all basically agree). And it’s partly because actually we do agree over all the fundamentals, and I’d really like to foster a friendly more collaborate atmosphere in effective altruism. For those reasons, while I’ll briefly mention a couple of examples where we’ve disagreed, please read them in the spirit of us being fundamentally very much on the same page and extremely grateful for the brilliant work GW do. These are simply my impression, and a reason we think our doing research is likely to have value despite GW’s excellent work. Times we’ve disagreed – GWWC didn’t recommend VillageReach (subsequently dropped by GW); GWWC continued recommending AMF over 2014 because we thought it was important AMF had continuity in donations in order to have leverage for making larger distribution agreements (GW has now stated they will recommend AMF for at least 2 years, for a similar reason); GWWC recommended both DWI and SCI earlier on than GW did.
When we report on our recommended charities such as the Against Malaria Foundation, we try to add to what Givewell has already researched and believe that they’ll hopefully take this into account in their future reports. For instance, here’s our new report on AMF:
where we cite research that hasn’t been taken into account by Givewell as of yet.
We’re also in contact with Givewell about their reports when we uncover errors (conceptual and factual). So far I’ve only had one email conversation with Givewell’s Jake Marcus about what I perceived as a misinterpretation about the decline in worm burden with age—but we ended up agreeing that we have different interpretation of the statistics.
Hi Hauke, thanks for answering! I’m going to split up sub-questions into multiple comments so the threads don’t get too tangled.
Our niche is to specialize on global poverty charities / interventions and we hope to continue to add to the knowledge base in this area. For instance, this means that we likely will not do much in-depth research on Marijuana legalization in Vermont. … Givewell now has 18 Full-time staff (and is expanding), but many work on the Open Philanthropy project and not that many on their top charities.
It sounds like you think GiveWell isn’t very focused on global poverty charities, but that’s not true. Compared to GWWC, they devote both a larger absolute number of staff, and a larger fraction of their staff, to researching global poverty charities (they attribute about half of their costs to their traditional work here, which implies ~9 full-time-equivalent people working on the traditional work.)
Oh sorry, I think I was not clear enough on this issue. I absolutely agree with you. Givewell is quite focused on global poverty issues. I do think that Givewell spends significantly more resources on research than we do. But as you said it’s only ~9 full-time staff instead of 18 full time staff as one might think just looking at the staff page.
Provide supervision for global poverty / effectiveness research projects to highly motivated students, in order to deeply involve them with EA.
Cool, I hadn’t thought about this one. What’s the scope of this? How many students do you typically have working on the research? What’s a typical student project?
This year we’ll have 3 summer interns for GWWC coming for 2-3 months and potentially a bit longer. Two of them will likely be substantially involved in research. I think this is somewhat representative of a typical GWWC summer internship cohort (Michelle might be able to add to this?).
We also have students from the UK doing research projects with us part-time. Some are at Oxford and come in to talk in person and some we talk to over skype. I estimate that I have about 2-3 hours of meetings with them a week and then spend some time to give feedback on their research (or sometimes on their essays). We’re currently trying to scale this up and get more volunteers.
Here’s a recent report from one of our student volunteers Max on TB (which is still in manuscript form and is not published yet):
Thanks everyone for your interesting in GWWC research.
The purpose of GWWC doing research is fourfold:
Find very effective charities/interventions and add to Givewell’s research. In the past we might have influenced Givewell’s recommendations—see: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-ky1zIxhwx_aUZiY3ZfOWplTXd2ODF5aEt2aUJOU2dKWTFV/view?usp=sharing Our niche is to specialize on global poverty charities / interventions and we hope to continue to add to the knowledge base in this area. For instance, this means that we likely will not do much in-depth research on Marijuana legalization in Vermont. We also focus more on intervention effectiveness than operations and the financials of charities (even though we do shallow investigations on this). Givewell now has 18 Full-time staff (and is expanding), but many work on the Open Philanthropy project and not that many on their top charities. There are still relatively few independent evaluators in world working on the intersection of effectiveness under ideal trial conditions (efficacy) and the effectiveness under large-scale programme conditions (effectiveness), and so I think it’s good to have more people working on this.
It’s also good to have some independent evaluation and peer-review of Givewell’s research, even in the case of highly transparent organisations such as Givewell
Provide supervision for global poverty / effectiveness research projects to highly motivated students, in order to deeply involve them with EA.
Finally, if we want to scale and grow roughly exponentially to eventually consistently move many millions to effective charities every year, it’s important to have in-house expertise to inform and fact-check our outreach and marketing, and make us credible when recommending charities to our members.
In the past, where has this led? Has your peer review uncovered any errors GiveWell has made? Or has it been more conceptual disagreements like the one over GiveDirectly?
I don’t think there’s a clear cut-off between conceptual and empirical disagreements, and I think it’s really important for us to highlight agreement rather than disagreement. That’s partly because it’s easy to give yourself a pretext for not donating / not donating to charities you aren’t personally connected with, so we don’t want to give people the impression of argument where there isn’t any (think of people citing disagreements over vaccines causing autism, or over climate change, when really scientists all basically agree). And it’s partly because actually we do agree over all the fundamentals, and I’d really like to foster a friendly more collaborate atmosphere in effective altruism. For those reasons, while I’ll briefly mention a couple of examples where we’ve disagreed, please read them in the spirit of us being fundamentally very much on the same page and extremely grateful for the brilliant work GW do. These are simply my impression, and a reason we think our doing research is likely to have value despite GW’s excellent work. Times we’ve disagreed – GWWC didn’t recommend VillageReach (subsequently dropped by GW); GWWC continued recommending AMF over 2014 because we thought it was important AMF had continuity in donations in order to have leverage for making larger distribution agreements (GW has now stated they will recommend AMF for at least 2 years, for a similar reason); GWWC recommended both DWI and SCI earlier on than GW did.
When we report on our recommended charities such as the Against Malaria Foundation, we try to add to what Givewell has already researched and believe that they’ll hopefully take this into account in their future reports. For instance, here’s our new report on AMF:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-ky1zIxhwx_QVBBb3ZuaVR5dEU/view?usp=sharing
a lot of the research cited in this report has not been taken into account by Givewell I believe.
Also look at our recent report on SCI here:
https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/blog/2015-03-31/charity-update-ii-schistosomiasis-control-initiative-sci
where we cite research that hasn’t been taken into account by Givewell as of yet.
We’re also in contact with Givewell about their reports when we uncover errors (conceptual and factual). So far I’ve only had one email conversation with Givewell’s Jake Marcus about what I perceived as a misinterpretation about the decline in worm burden with age—but we ended up agreeing that we have different interpretation of the statistics.
Hi Hauke, thanks for answering! I’m going to split up sub-questions into multiple comments so the threads don’t get too tangled.
It sounds like you think GiveWell isn’t very focused on global poverty charities, but that’s not true. Compared to GWWC, they devote both a larger absolute number of staff, and a larger fraction of their staff, to researching global poverty charities (they attribute about half of their costs to their traditional work here, which implies ~9 full-time-equivalent people working on the traditional work.)
Oh sorry, I think I was not clear enough on this issue. I absolutely agree with you. Givewell is quite focused on global poverty issues. I do think that Givewell spends significantly more resources on research than we do. But as you said it’s only ~9 full-time staff instead of 18 full time staff as one might think just looking at the staff page.
Cool, I hadn’t thought about this one. What’s the scope of this? How many students do you typically have working on the research? What’s a typical student project?
This year we’ll have 3 summer interns for GWWC coming for 2-3 months and potentially a bit longer. Two of them will likely be substantially involved in research. I think this is somewhat representative of a typical GWWC summer internship cohort (Michelle might be able to add to this?). We also have students from the UK doing research projects with us part-time. Some are at Oxford and come in to talk in person and some we talk to over skype. I estimate that I have about 2-3 hours of meetings with them a week and then spend some time to give feedback on their research (or sometimes on their essays). We’re currently trying to scale this up and get more volunteers.
Here’s a recent report from one of our student volunteers Max on TB (which is still in manuscript form and is not published yet):
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lEy4PuJHWVD0JQufb8FPyYm1bN5JYAiA6Ivoko5ROGY/edit?usp=sharing
you can find more of our students writing on our blog:
https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/blog