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I suspect that this would be a net good. We need to move more people towards cost effectiveness and this involves meetings people where they are. If this succeeded in creating a large group of people who were somewhat closer to the EA perspective, then EA might have a significantly easier time bringing in more members. And I suspect that this might be more than enough to counter-balance any people who change from donating to the most effective globally to the most effective locally.

(EDIT: The commenter below is right that this was addressed and I missed it): You missed one key consideration. It could also redirect money from more efficient overseas charities to less efficient US charities and even if this was a small amount, it may still be net negative if the utility difference was large enough.

Nice! I think it could be really valuable to create “GiveWell-style” charity evaluators for other areas. ACE started this off with animal charities, but I think some of the areas you listed could be good fits, as well as others e.g. biorisk/​AI charities.

You mention this in the 5th benefit, but a major upside in my mind is incentivizing the space to place greater value in effectiveness and transparency. These effects could be far reaching and hard to quantify. You might see if ACE thinks this happened with animal advocacy because of their work.

There are potentially major benefits even if you fail:

• You could gain valuable insights around starting such a venture, and around the focus area. This could be valuable both to you, and to the broader movement if you can distill it into a postmortem.

• Starting an ambitious venture and failing can still be valuable career capital if you can show you hit certain milestones or can take away major lessons.

In general, I think you are overweighing the possible effects on EA /​ GiveWell. As the project grows you can decide how much explicit association you have with EA and GiveWell.

The biggest cost seems in my mind is the opportunity cost. Differences in cause areas can be pretty huge, so if you are working on a suboptimal cause, you might have a much lower impact.

Some people/​organizations are doing similar things, but in general I agree with others that opportunity cost is the main downside. At the same time, I could see some of these, especially 2-3, actually offering cost-effective impacts because of low-probability systemic changes.

Impact Matters isn’t doing exactly this, but they do something similar to it: https://​​www.impactm.org/​​

Another resources is the Center for Evidence-Based Programs: evidencebasedprograms.org

Charity Navigator already exists. GuideStar too. If people would just use those, it would be better than something like ²⁄₃ of Americans not looking into the causes they support. If an American is so set on rich country charities, just mentioning or encouraging those tools would be enough.

An American charity evaluator would have to compete with the charity ranking sites too. I don’t think it would get off the ground very easily.

I also don’t think it would be associated with Effective Altruism. Doesn’t make sense if it’s just based on location.