For clarity being 2x better than cash transfers would still provide it with good reason to be on GWWC’s top charity list, right? Since GiveDirectly is?
I think GiveDirectly gets special privilege because “just give the money to the poorest people” is such a safe bet for how to spend money altruistically.
Like if a billionaire wanted to spend a million dollars making your life better, they could either:
just give you the million dollars directly, or
spend the money on something that they personally think would be best for you
You’d want them to set a pretty high bar of “I have high confidence that the thing I chose to spend the money on will be much better than whatever you would spend the money on yourself.”
GiveDirectly does not have the “top-rated” label on GWWC’s list, while SM does as of this morning.
I can’t find the discussion, but my understanding is that “top-rated” means that an evaluator GWWC trusts—in SM’s case, that was Founder’s Pledge—thinks that a charity is at a certain multiple (was it like 4x?) over GiveDirectly.
However, on this post, Matt Lerner @ FP wrote that “We disagree with HLI about SM’s rating — we use HLI’s work as a starting point and arrive at an undiscounted rating of 5-6x; subjective discounts place it between 1-2x, which squares with GiveWell’s analysis.”
So it seems that GWWC should withdraw the “top-rated” flag because none of its trusted evaluation partners currently rate SM at better than 2.3X cash. It should not, however, remove SM from the GWWC platform as it meets the criteria for inclusion.
Hmm this feels a bit off. I don’t think GiveDirectly should get special privelege. Though I agree the out of model factors seem to go well for GD than others, so I would kind of bump it up.
I think GiveDirectly gets special privilege because “just give the money to the poorest people” is such a safe bet for how to spend money altruistically.
Like if a billionaire wanted to spend a million dollars making your life better, they could either:
just give you the million dollars directly, or
spend the money on something that they personally think would be best for you
You’d want them to set a pretty high bar of “I have high confidence that the thing I chose to spend the money on will be much better than whatever you would spend the money on yourself.”
GiveDirectly does not have the “top-rated” label on GWWC’s list, while SM does as of this morning.
I can’t find the discussion, but my understanding is that “top-rated” means that an evaluator GWWC trusts—in SM’s case, that was Founder’s Pledge—thinks that a charity is at a certain multiple (was it like 4x?) over GiveDirectly.
However, on this post, Matt Lerner @ FP wrote that “We disagree with HLI about SM’s rating — we use HLI’s work as a starting point and arrive at an undiscounted rating of 5-6x; subjective discounts place it between 1-2x, which squares with GiveWell’s analysis.”
So it seems that GWWC should withdraw the “top-rated” flag because none of its trusted evaluation partners currently rate SM at better than 2.3X cash. It should not, however, remove SM from the GWWC platform as it meets the criteria for inclusion.
Hmm this feels a bit off. I don’t think GiveDirectly should get special privelege. Though I agree the out of model factors seem to go well for GD than others, so I would kind of bump it up.