For an early stage charity like ACE it seems that capacity building is indeed a very important consideration (related to Ben Todd’s point about the growth approach). E.g. it would allow them to move much more money later, and at the moment moving not that much money is a reason why they don’t look so good in our model. Unfortunately we aren’t able to incorporate this in our quantitative model (IMO another reason to look beyond quantitative models for decision making at this point, but people may have ways of incorporating it quantitatively—it won’t be hard to make a theoretical model of R&D, but fitting it empirically will be the big challenge).
On (i), Open Phil’s Lewis Bollard’s recommendation and ACE’s own plan make it look like capacity building is something they try to do.
On (ii) and (iii), these have been true for GiveWell historically. E.g. on (iii), last year they added quite a few top charities. But I don’t know ACE enough to say if they will grow in the way GiveWell did.
Tom and Peter:
For an early stage charity like ACE it seems that capacity building is indeed a very important consideration (related to Ben Todd’s point about the growth approach). E.g. it would allow them to move much more money later, and at the moment moving not that much money is a reason why they don’t look so good in our model. Unfortunately we aren’t able to incorporate this in our quantitative model (IMO another reason to look beyond quantitative models for decision making at this point, but people may have ways of incorporating it quantitatively—it won’t be hard to make a theoretical model of R&D, but fitting it empirically will be the big challenge).
On (i), Open Phil’s Lewis Bollard’s recommendation and ACE’s own plan make it look like capacity building is something they try to do.
On (ii) and (iii), these have been true for GiveWell historically. E.g. on (iii), last year they added quite a few top charities. But I don’t know ACE enough to say if they will grow in the way GiveWell did.