“Why does GWWC continue to do charity evaluation research?”
I think it could be useful to have more than one organisation evaluating interventions, rather than having all our eggs in one basket. That doesn’t mean it should be GWWC but I’m happy for there to be overlap, it will add verification to GiveWell’s recommendations as well as potentially uncovering new ones.
It is true that redundancy typically adds resilience to complex systems. But how much is this added resilience worth if you try to put a dollar amount on it? I think that what GWWC is doing overall is great, but I concur with Ben, it is a bit unclear at the moment what value GWWC adds in this regard.
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.
Michelle or Hauke can add more, but part of the answer is that being across the best research out there is crucial to our outreach.
People are willing to take our recommendations seriously because we show that we understand why these charities are excellent and are keeping tabs on them. We also need to be able to explain how these cost effectiveness estimates are arrived at, and generally say other smart things to be taken seriously. That isn’t possible without someone working almost full time understanding the research that GiveWell and others are producing.
As a result, even if the research had no value in discovering new knowledge (which isn’t true of course) and we were only focussed on outreach, we would probably want to have a researcher on our team (especially as we now have six people working on GWWC so can afford some specialisation).
Of course Hauke is actually turning up new points and looking into approaches for reducing poverty that we haven’t looked at properly before and should be able to say something intelligent about.
“Why does GWWC continue to do charity evaluation research?”
I think it could be useful to have more than one organisation evaluating interventions, rather than having all our eggs in one basket. That doesn’t mean it should be GWWC but I’m happy for there to be overlap, it will add verification to GiveWell’s recommendations as well as potentially uncovering new ones.
It is true that redundancy typically adds resilience to complex systems. But how much is this added resilience worth if you try to put a dollar amount on it? I think that what GWWC is doing overall is great, but I concur with Ben, it is a bit unclear at the moment what value GWWC adds in this regard.
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.
Michelle or Hauke can add more, but part of the answer is that being across the best research out there is crucial to our outreach.
People are willing to take our recommendations seriously because we show that we understand why these charities are excellent and are keeping tabs on them. We also need to be able to explain how these cost effectiveness estimates are arrived at, and generally say other smart things to be taken seriously. That isn’t possible without someone working almost full time understanding the research that GiveWell and others are producing.
As a result, even if the research had no value in discovering new knowledge (which isn’t true of course) and we were only focussed on outreach, we would probably want to have a researcher on our team (especially as we now have six people working on GWWC so can afford some specialisation).
Of course Hauke is actually turning up new points and looking into approaches for reducing poverty that we haven’t looked at properly before and should be able to say something intelligent about.