What a great post, thank you so much for doing this important work.
I’m interested to know why you chose to “still think ACE’s funds and recommendations are worth considering for impact-focused donors and we will continue to host them on the GWWC donation platform” and later say “ACE’s charity evaluation process does not currently measure marginal cost-effectiveness to a sufficient extent for us to rely directly on the resulting charity recommendations”. I understand that there may be hope for the future but right now if the role of EA is to nudge people to the opportunities that have the highest marginal impact per dollar, shouldn’t GWWC focus exclusively on EAWF, or are you saying there is something lacking in the analysis here?
The important nuance here is that while we did not think ACE’s current charity evaluation process measures marginal cost-effectiveness to a sufficient extent to directly rely on ACE’s recommendations, that isn’t the same as the (stronger) claim that its recommendations are necessarily worse donation opportunities than the AWF or THL’s corporate campaigns, and it also isn’t the same as claiming that ACE’s process doesn’t track marginal cost-effectiveness at all.
We can’t say confidently how ACE’s (other) recommendations compare to the AWF or THL’s corporate campaigns, as we haven’t individually evaluated and compared them. So we want to offer donors who have the time and expertise to look into these promising individual charities the opportunity to do so and potentially donate to them if they find them to be maximising impact by their worldview, as we do for many more charities and funds on our platform that we can’t currently justify recommending (for instance because they haven’t been evaluated (yet)).
What a great post, thank you so much for doing this important work.
I’m interested to know why you chose to “still think ACE’s funds and recommendations are worth considering for impact-focused donors and we will continue to host them on the GWWC donation platform” and later say “ACE’s charity evaluation process does not currently measure marginal cost-effectiveness to a sufficient extent for us to rely directly on the resulting charity recommendations”. I understand that there may be hope for the future but right now if the role of EA is to nudge people to the opportunities that have the highest marginal impact per dollar, shouldn’t GWWC focus exclusively on EAWF, or are you saying there is something lacking in the analysis here?
Would appreciate some clarification
Thanks for your question!
The important nuance here is that while we did not think ACE’s current charity evaluation process measures marginal cost-effectiveness to a sufficient extent to directly rely on ACE’s recommendations, that isn’t the same as the (stronger) claim that its recommendations are necessarily worse donation opportunities than the AWF or THL’s corporate campaigns, and it also isn’t the same as claiming that ACE’s process doesn’t track marginal cost-effectiveness at all.
We can’t say confidently how ACE’s (other) recommendations compare to the AWF or THL’s corporate campaigns, as we haven’t individually evaluated and compared them. So we want to offer donors who have the time and expertise to look into these promising individual charities the opportunity to do so and potentially donate to them if they find them to be maximising impact by their worldview, as we do for many more charities and funds on our platform that we can’t currently justify recommending (for instance because they haven’t been evaluated (yet)).
You may also be interested in our answer to this somewhat related question under the AMA post.