What a great post, thank you so much for doing this important work.
Iām interested to know why you chose to āstill think ACEās funds and recommendations are worth considering for impact-focused donors and we will continue to host them on the GWWC donation platformā and later say āACEās charity evaluation process does not currently measure marginal cost-effectiveness to a sufficient extent for us to rely directly on the resulting charity recommendationsā. 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, shouldnāt 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 ACEās current charity evaluation process measures marginal cost-effectiveness to a sufficient extent to directly rely on ACEās recommendations, that isnāt the same as the (stronger) claim that its recommendations are necessarily worse donation opportunities than the AWF or THLās corporate campaigns, and it also isnāt the same as claiming that ACEās process doesnāt track marginal cost-effectiveness at all.
We canāt say confidently how ACEās (other) recommendations compare to the AWF or THLās corporate campaigns, as we havenāt 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 canāt currently justify recommending (for instance because they havenāt been evaluated (yet)).
What a great post, thank you so much for doing this important work.
Iām interested to know why you chose to āstill think ACEās funds and recommendations are worth considering for impact-focused donors and we will continue to host them on the GWWC donation platformā and later say āACEās charity evaluation process does not currently measure marginal cost-effectiveness to a sufficient extent for us to rely directly on the resulting charity recommendationsā. 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, shouldnāt 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 ACEās current charity evaluation process measures marginal cost-effectiveness to a sufficient extent to directly rely on ACEās recommendations, that isnāt the same as the (stronger) claim that its recommendations are necessarily worse donation opportunities than the AWF or THLās corporate campaigns, and it also isnāt the same as claiming that ACEās process doesnāt track marginal cost-effectiveness at all.
We canāt say confidently how ACEās (other) recommendations compare to the AWF or THLās corporate campaigns, as we havenāt 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 canāt currently justify recommending (for instance because they havenāt been evaluated (yet)).
You may also be interested in our answer to this somewhat related question under the AMA post.