What you’re describing sounds a lot like what we’re attempting to do with the Good Ventures-GiveWell partnership, excepting a few details. I wonder whether you also see them as similar and what you see as the notable differences?
I would certainly agree they are quite similar, and think that Good Ventures is closer to how we would do things than almost all existing foundations, and tremendously good news for the world.
This makes sense. Nick has worked at GiveWell. I have been following and interacting with GiveWell since its founding. We share access to much of our respective knowledge bases, surrounding intellectual communities, and an interest in effective altruism, so we should expect a lot of overlap in approaches to solve similar problems.
Growing the EA community’s capabilities and quality of decision-making, pursuing high value-of-information questions about the available philanthropic options, and similar efforts are robustly valuable.
It’s harder for me to pin down differences with GV because of my uncertainty about Good Ventures’ reasoning behind some of its choices. Posting conversations makes it easier to see what information GV has access to, but I feel I know a lot more about GW’s internal thinking than GV’s.
Relative to GiveWell, I think we may care more about protecting the long-term trajectory of civilization relative to short-term benefits. And, speaking for myself at least, I am more skeptical that optimizing for short-term QALYs or similar measures will turn out to be very close to optimizing for long-term metrics. I’m not sure about GV’s take on those questions.
At the tactical level, and again speaking for myself and not for Nick, based on my current state of knowledge I don’t see how GV’s ratio of learning-by-granting relative to granting to fund direct learning efforts is optimal for learning.
For example, GiveWell and Good Ventures now provide the vast majority of funding for AMF. I am not convinced that moving from $15 MM to $20 MM of AMF funding provides information close in value to what could be purchased if one spent $5 MM more directly on information-gathering. GiveWell’s main argument on this point has been inability to hire using cash until recently, but it seems to me that existing commercial and other services can be used to buy valuable knowledge.
I’ll mention a few examples that come to mind. ScienceExchange, a marketplace that connects funders and scientific labs willing to take on projects for hire, is being used by the Center for Open Science to commission replications of scientific studies of interest. Polling firms can perform polls and surveys, of relevant experts or of the general public or donors, for hire in a standardized fashion. Consulting firms with skilled generalists or industry experts can be commissioned at market rates to acquire data and perform analysis in particular areas. Professional fundraising firms could have been commissioned to try street fundraising or direct mail and the like for AMF to learn whether those approaches are effective for GiveWell’s top charities.
Also, in buying access to information from nonprofit organizations, it’s not easy for me to understand the relationship between the extent of access/information and the grant, e.g. why make a grant sufficient to hire multiple full time staff-years in exchange for one staff-day of time? I can see various reasons why one might do this, such as wariness from nonprofits about sharing potentially embarrassing information, compensating for extensive investments required to produce the information in the first place, testing RFMF hypotheses, and building a reputation, but given what I know now I am not confident that the price is right if some of these grants really are primarily about gaining information. [However, the grants are still relatively small compared to your overall resources, so such overpayment is not a severe problem if it is a problem.]
Zooming out back to the big picture, I’ll reiterate that we are very much on the same page and are great fans of GV’s work.
I broadly agree with Carl’s comment, though I have less of
an opinion about the specifics of how you have done your learning grants. Part
of your question may be, “Why would you do this if we’re already doing it?” I
believe that strategic cause selection is an enormous issue and we have something to contribute. In this scenario, we certainly would want to work
with you and like-minded organizations.
Hi Nick — I did not at all mean to imply, “Why would you do this if we’re already doing it?” I see enormous value in other people experimenting with strategic cause selection and was gratified to read this post. I simply was surprised that you didn’t mention that GiveWell Labs, by and large, is taking the approach you outlined, including investigating four of the five issue areas you mentioned. That made me think either we’re not communicating well enough about what we’re doing, which seems likely, or that you see the two approaches as more different than I do.
What you’re describing sounds a lot like what we’re attempting to do with the Good Ventures-GiveWell partnership, excepting a few details. I wonder whether you also see them as similar and what you see as the notable differences?
Hi Cari,
I would certainly agree they are quite similar, and think that Good Ventures is closer to how we would do things than almost all existing foundations, and tremendously good news for the world.
This makes sense. Nick has worked at GiveWell. I have been following and interacting with GiveWell since its founding. We share access to much of our respective knowledge bases, surrounding intellectual communities, and an interest in effective altruism, so we should expect a lot of overlap in approaches to solve similar problems.
Growing the EA community’s capabilities and quality of decision-making, pursuing high value-of-information questions about the available philanthropic options, and similar efforts are robustly valuable.
It’s harder for me to pin down differences with GV because of my uncertainty about Good Ventures’ reasoning behind some of its choices. Posting conversations makes it easier to see what information GV has access to, but I feel I know a lot more about GW’s internal thinking than GV’s.
Relative to GiveWell, I think we may care more about protecting the long-term trajectory of civilization relative to short-term benefits. And, speaking for myself at least, I am more skeptical that optimizing for short-term QALYs or similar measures will turn out to be very close to optimizing for long-term metrics. I’m not sure about GV’s take on those questions.
At the tactical level, and again speaking for myself and not for Nick, based on my current state of knowledge I don’t see how GV’s ratio of learning-by-granting relative to granting to fund direct learning efforts is optimal for learning.
For example, GiveWell and Good Ventures now provide the vast majority of funding for AMF. I am not convinced that moving from $15 MM to $20 MM of AMF funding provides information close in value to what could be purchased if one spent $5 MM more directly on information-gathering. GiveWell’s main argument on this point has been inability to hire using cash until recently, but it seems to me that existing commercial and other services can be used to buy valuable knowledge.
I’ll mention a few examples that come to mind. ScienceExchange, a marketplace that connects funders and scientific labs willing to take on projects for hire, is being used by the Center for Open Science to commission replications of scientific studies of interest. Polling firms can perform polls and surveys, of relevant experts or of the general public or donors, for hire in a standardized fashion. Consulting firms with skilled generalists or industry experts can be commissioned at market rates to acquire data and perform analysis in particular areas. Professional fundraising firms could have been commissioned to try street fundraising or direct mail and the like for AMF to learn whether those approaches are effective for GiveWell’s top charities.
Also, in buying access to information from nonprofit organizations, it’s not easy for me to understand the relationship between the extent of access/information and the grant, e.g. why make a grant sufficient to hire multiple full time staff-years in exchange for one staff-day of time? I can see various reasons why one might do this, such as wariness from nonprofits about sharing potentially embarrassing information, compensating for extensive investments required to produce the information in the first place, testing RFMF hypotheses, and building a reputation, but given what I know now I am not confident that the price is right if some of these grants really are primarily about gaining information. [However, the grants are still relatively small compared to your overall resources, so such overpayment is not a severe problem if it is a problem.]
Zooming out back to the big picture, I’ll reiterate that we are very much on the same page and are great fans of GV’s work.
I broadly agree with Carl’s comment, though I have less of an opinion about the specifics of how you have done your learning grants. Part of your question may be, “Why would you do this if we’re already doing it?” I believe that strategic cause selection is an enormous issue and we have something to contribute. In this scenario, we certainly would want to work with you and like-minded organizations.
Hi Nick — I did not at all mean to imply, “Why would you do this if we’re already doing it?” I see enormous value in other people experimenting with strategic cause selection and was gratified to read this post. I simply was surprised that you didn’t mention that GiveWell Labs, by and large, is taking the approach you outlined, including investigating four of the five issue areas you mentioned. That made me think either we’re not communicating well enough about what we’re doing, which seems likely, or that you see the two approaches as more different than I do.