Thanks—I think you’re right that the EA hive mind would also find some interesting things!
Re the % that should produce public evaluations: I feel pretty unsure. I think it’s important that organizations that are 1) trying to demonstrate with a lot of rigor that they’re extremely cost-effective, and 2) asking for lots of public donations should probably do public evaluations. Maybe my best guess is that most other orgs shouldn’t do this, but should have other governance and feedback mechanisms? And then maybe the first type of organizations are like 20% of total EA orgs, and ~50% of current donations (numbers totally made up).
FWIW, I think about this quite differently. My mental model is more along the lines of “EAs should hold EA charities to the same or higher standards of public evaluation (in terms of frequency and quality) as comparable (in terms of size and type of work) charities outside of EA.” I think the effective altruism homepage does a pretty good job of encapsulating those standards (“We should evaluate the work that charities do, and value transparency and good evidence”). The fact that this statement links to GiveWell (along with lots of other EA discourse) implies that we generally think that evaluation should be public.
Thanks—I think you’re right that the EA hive mind would also find some interesting things!
Re the % that should produce public evaluations: I feel pretty unsure. I think it’s important that organizations that are 1) trying to demonstrate with a lot of rigor that they’re extremely cost-effective, and 2) asking for lots of public donations should probably do public evaluations. Maybe my best guess is that most other orgs shouldn’t do this, but should have other governance and feedback mechanisms? And then maybe the first type of organizations are like 20% of total EA orgs, and ~50% of current donations (numbers totally made up).
Thanks for sharing your thinking on this.
FWIW, I think about this quite differently. My mental model is more along the lines of “EAs should hold EA charities to the same or higher standards of public evaluation (in terms of frequency and quality) as comparable (in terms of size and type of work) charities outside of EA.” I think the effective altruism homepage does a pretty good job of encapsulating those standards (“We should evaluate the work that charities do, and value transparency and good evidence”). The fact that this statement links to GiveWell (along with lots of other EA discourse) implies that we generally think that evaluation should be public.