As far as I can tell, Simonâs allegations are either unsubstantiated (no proof offered, or even claims specific enough to verify) or seem irrelevant to GiveWellâs work (why do I care whether their CEO makes more or less money than a Berkeley economics professor?).
The closest thing I can find to a verifiable claim is his claim that early assessments of GiveWell were either written by interns/âvolunteers or were âneutral to negative.â
Going off of this page, Iâd judge independent evaluations as âneutral to positiveâ (I donât see any evaluations that seem more negative than positive, though I didnât read every review in full). The evaluation with the most criticism (of those I read in full) was written by a GiveWell volunteer (Pierre Thompson).
As for claims like âwe sent some of their materials to faculty who actually do charity evaluationsâ; who are these faculty? Where can I read their evaluations? Simon summarizes these expertsâ judgment of GiveWellâs work as âbook reportsâ: What does that mean? What did GiveWell get wrong? Were their issues based on disagreement around contentious points, or on obvious mistakes that anyone should have caught?
(And of course, it sounds like this is almost all in reference to GiveWell circa ~2012, which has limited bearing on the very different set of recommendations they make today.)
*****
Then thereâs the claim that GiveWell takes a fraction of donorsâ money when they regrant to charities, which is false (unless you check an unchecked-by-default box that adds a small extra donation for GiveWellâs operations). Maybe things were different eight years ago?
As for the claim that GiveWell supported the Singularity Institute at some point; Holden Karnofsky wrote a long post criticizing the org and explaining why GiveWell had no plans to fund it. If Simon was murky on that detail (as well as on details about SIâs missing money, which werenât that hard for me to find), that reduces my credence in his various unsupported claims.
As far as I can tell, Simonâs allegations are either unsubstantiated (no proof offered, or even claims specific enough to verify) or seem irrelevant to GiveWellâs work (why do I care whether their CEO makes more or less money than a Berkeley economics professor?).
The closest thing I can find to a verifiable claim is his claim that early assessments of GiveWell were either written by interns/âvolunteers or were âneutral to negative.â
Going off of this page, Iâd judge independent evaluations as âneutral to positiveâ (I donât see any evaluations that seem more negative than positive, though I didnât read every review in full). The evaluation with the most criticism (of those I read in full) was written by a GiveWell volunteer (Pierre Thompson).
As for claims like âwe sent some of their materials to faculty who actually do charity evaluationsâ; who are these faculty? Where can I read their evaluations? Simon summarizes these expertsâ judgment of GiveWellâs work as âbook reportsâ: What does that mean? What did GiveWell get wrong? Were their issues based on disagreement around contentious points, or on obvious mistakes that anyone should have caught?
(And of course, it sounds like this is almost all in reference to GiveWell circa ~2012, which has limited bearing on the very different set of recommendations they make today.)
*****
Then thereâs the claim that GiveWell takes a fraction of donorsâ money when they regrant to charities, which is false (unless you check an unchecked-by-default box that adds a small extra donation for GiveWellâs operations). Maybe things were different eight years ago?
As for the claim that GiveWell supported the Singularity Institute at some point; Holden Karnofsky wrote a long post criticizing the org and explaining why GiveWell had no plans to fund it. If Simon was murky on that detail (as well as on details about SIâs missing money, which werenât that hard for me to find), that reduces my credence in his various unsupported claims.