I notice that the Impact page might be double counting impact. I know it’s not meant to provide a rigorous accounting, but it still seems like an issue that the page should at least acknowledge.
The “Grantmaking, fundraising, and donor advisement” section seems especially problematic. Since many of those funds went to other organizations listed on that page, it seems clear that you can’t just “add up” all of the facts on that page to get a sense for total impact.
For example, Open Philanthropy “has made hundreds of millions of dollars in grants”. From their database it looks like ~$57M to GiveDirectly. Is that included in “GiveDirectly has facilitated more than $100 million in direct cash transfers”, as also listed on that page?
I’m not saying that there’s any wrongdoing or that it’s a huge priority to change it. But I think it’s a little bit misleading—and a simple disclaimer at the top of the page would be a good fix for now.
What do you think—is this actually double counting? If so does it matter? And if so, what can be done?
(Apologies if this has been asked before, I couldn’t find it through the search.)
Thanks for asking! I wrote the current version of that page and would like for it to read cleanly, without double-counting concerns. I basically put together a bullet list and sanity-checked with a couple of other people before publishing, so additional feedback like this is very welcome.
I’ll take a look at the page tonight and see about resolving the issues you identified. (I might also publish it on the Forum soon and see what other feedback people have, and what other examples should be on the page.)
The page has now been updated. I added the following caveat:
Note that some of the funding described here has gone toward the charities described above. This means that certain “impacts” on this page may appear twice — for example, grants from Open Philanthropy help to fund GiveDirectly’s work. We discuss both the work and the funding to provide a more complete picture of the movement, but we caution you not to count the impact twice.
Given that I expect this page to keep including examples of fundraising success and actions by charities, and to add more examples of both over time, I think a caveat is better than trying to avoid ever featuring a grant and its outcome at the same time.
(One could argue that the actions are more important to discuss than the funding, but I think the funding numbers provide a sense of EA’s overall scale that doesn’t appear if you just look at a sample of charities.)
This looks like a great solution! FYI I don’t see it up yet, maybe it hasn’t been deployed or something.
Maybe you’re not looking at the right section? It’s been here:
My mistake! You’re right, I see it now.