My major concern:
Making this less prominent further increases the ‘gap in the market’ for people who could be convinced to care about effectiveness, but are not eager to give in these particular categories. The GiveWell Top 9 charities do 6 things, and other than GiveDirectly all of these are health interventions.
Which is great.
But we all know many people and orgs that say
‘we want to give to something education (or female, or food...) related’
‘we already supported mosquito nets and vitamins, what else can we do’ or
’we need to support an organization that has been around a long time (or is top-rated on Charity Navigator, or is associated with some country or religion)
To some extent, I agree this is misguided.
But at the moment these people often end up giving to something we know to much less effective (like giving science equipment to schools in New York, or supporting food banks in London).
I think we need a credible rating to give to people, to be able to discern between, e.g., the Fistula Foundation and St. Jude’s, or between Donors Choose and Development Media International … rather have these people donate to something we have a good reason to think is many orders of magnitude less efficient.
SoGive does a lot of things right, and Sanjay is EA-aligned, but it’s reach is limited (UK focused) and it concentrates on outputs rather than impact, in a sense.
So I think we are missing the chance to positively influence a huge amount of funds if we don’t have a ‘real impact based charity rating’ that
includes a somewhat more diverse and mainstream list of charities,
compares among charities that are not necessarily at the very top
where the nature of the intervention is somewhat harder to asses (or the charity does more than one intervention, some of which may even be in the top categories)
While well-intended, I fear that de-emphasizing standout charities is a step away from this, in the wrong direction.
There is an adjacent issue that the difference in perspective might not be somewhat arbitrary restrictions like in your examples, but instead be a matter of weighing different moral goods (e.g., the value of older vs younger lives) differently.
I agree. Your issue is relevant to more sophisticated EA-adjacent types too. I would love to have/build a simple app (R-shiny) that allows the user to input these concerns and tailor their analysis.
My major concern: Making this less prominent further increases the ‘gap in the market’ for people who could be convinced to care about effectiveness, but are not eager to give in these particular categories. The GiveWell Top 9 charities do 6 things, and other than GiveDirectly all of these are health interventions.
Which is great.
But we all know many people and orgs that say
‘we want to give to something education (or female, or food...) related’
‘we already supported mosquito nets and vitamins, what else can we do’ or
’we need to support an organization that has been around a long time (or is top-rated on Charity Navigator, or is associated with some country or religion)
To some extent, I agree this is misguided.
But at the moment these people often end up giving to something we know to much less effective (like giving science equipment to schools in New York, or supporting food banks in London).
I think we need a credible rating to give to people, to be able to discern between, e.g., the Fistula Foundation and St. Jude’s, or between Donors Choose and Development Media International … rather have these people donate to something we have a good reason to think is many orders of magnitude less efficient.
There is no place these people can go to. Impact Matters offered something in this direction, but they were taken over by Charity Navigator, and the integration does not look promising (at least not yet).
SoGive does a lot of things right, and Sanjay is EA-aligned, but it’s reach is limited (UK focused) and it concentrates on outputs rather than impact, in a sense.
So I think we are missing the chance to positively influence a huge amount of funds if we don’t have a ‘real impact based charity rating’ that
includes a somewhat more diverse and mainstream list of charities,
compares among charities that are not necessarily at the very top
where the nature of the intervention is somewhat harder to asses (or the charity does more than one intervention, some of which may even be in the top categories)
While well-intended, I fear that de-emphasizing standout charities is a step away from this, in the wrong direction.
There is an adjacent issue that the difference in perspective might not be somewhat arbitrary restrictions like in your examples, but instead be a matter of weighing different moral goods (e.g., the value of older vs younger lives) differently.
I agree. Your issue is relevant to more sophisticated EA-adjacent types too. I would love to have/build a simple app (R-shiny) that allows the user to input these concerns and tailor their analysis.