As far as I can tell, Simon’s allegations are either unsubstantiated (no proof offered, or even claims specific enough to verify) or seem irrelevant to GiveWell’s 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/volunteers or were “neutral to negative.”
Going off of this page, I’d judge independent evaluations as “neutral to positive” (I don’t see any evaluations that seem more negative than positive, though I didn’t 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 “we sent some of their materials to faculty who actually do charity evaluations”; who are these faculty? Where can I read their evaluations? Simon summarizes these experts’ judgment of GiveWell’s work as “book reports”: 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 there’s the claim that GiveWell takes a fraction of donors’ money when they regrant to charities, which is false (unless you check an unchecked-by-default box that adds a small extra donation for GiveWell’s 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 SI’s missing money, which weren’t that hard for me to find), that reduces my credence in his various unsupported claims.
As far as I can tell, Simon’s allegations are either unsubstantiated (no proof offered, or even claims specific enough to verify) or seem irrelevant to GiveWell’s 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/volunteers or were “neutral to negative.”
Going off of this page, I’d judge independent evaluations as “neutral to positive” (I don’t see any evaluations that seem more negative than positive, though I didn’t 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 “we sent some of their materials to faculty who actually do charity evaluations”; who are these faculty? Where can I read their evaluations? Simon summarizes these experts’ judgment of GiveWell’s work as “book reports”: 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 there’s the claim that GiveWell takes a fraction of donors’ money when they regrant to charities, which is false (unless you check an unchecked-by-default box that adds a small extra donation for GiveWell’s 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 SI’s missing money, which weren’t that hard for me to find), that reduces my credence in his various unsupported claims.