Thanks for clarifying, Joel! I plan to recommend people donate to CEARCH’s High Impact Philanthropy Fund (HIPF) in a post I am writing which I will share in this thread once it is published. Is HIPF trying to avert as many DALYs as possible in a risk neutral way? If so, I do not have to recommend restricted donations. Do you have a guess for HIPF’s marginal cost-effectiveness as a fraction of that of GiveWell’s top charities? I would guess 55 as implied by CEARCH’s CEA of advocating for taxing sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs).
Impact, nuclear, and volcanic winters would decrease the number of wild animals a lot, but replacing forested area with cropland to produce more food would decrease them further.
Our grantmaking always aims at maximizing DALYS averted (with income and other stuff translated to DALYs too).
In terms of cost-effectiveness, it’s nominally 30-50x GW, but GiveWell is more rigorous in discounting, so our figures should be inflated relative to GW. Based on some internal analysis we did of GW’s greater strictness in individual line-item estimation and in the greater number of adjustments they employ, we think a more conservative estimate is that our estimates may be up to 3x inflated (i.e. something we think is 10x GW may be closer to 3x GW, which is why we use a 10x GW threshold for recommending GHD causes in the first place—to ensure that what we recommend is genuinely >GW, and moving money to the new cause area is +EV).
So my more conservative guess for our grantmaking is that it’s closer to 9-15x GW, but again I have to emphasize the high uncertainty (and riskiness, which is the inherent price we pay for these ultra high EV policy interventions).
Thanks, Joel! Do you also think your estimate that donating to Giving What We Can (GWWC) this year is 13 times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities is also 3 times as high as it should be, such that your best guess is that it is 4.33 (= 13⁄3) times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities (although there is large uncertainty)? Or is the adjustment only supposed to be applicable to CEARCH’s CEAs listed here?
Hey Vasco, the adjustment is specific to GiveWell vs us (or indeed, non-GW CEAs), since GiveWell probably is the most rigorous in discounting, while other organizations are less so, for various reasons (mainly time—that’s true for us, and why we just use a rough 10x GW threshold; and it’s true of FP too; Matt Lerner goes into detail here on the tradeoff between drilling down vs spending researcher time finding and supporting more high EV opportunities instead).
Relative to every other organization, I don’t find CEARCH to be systematically overoptimistic in the same way (at least for our deep/final round CEAs).
For our GWWC evaluation, I think the ballpark figure (robustly positive multiplier) probably still holds, but I’m uncertain about the precise figure right now, after seeing some of GWWC’s latest data (they’ll release their 2023-24 impact evaluation soon).
I plan to recommend people donate to CEARCH’s High Impact Philanthropy Fund (HIPF) in a post I am writing which I will share in this thread once it is published.
I have now published the post where I recommend HIPF. It looks into the cost-effectiveness of interventions accounting for soil nematodes, mites, and springtails.
Thanks for clarifying, Joel! I plan to recommend people donate to CEARCH’s High Impact Philanthropy Fund (HIPF) in a post I am writing which I will share in this thread once it is published. Is HIPF trying to avert as many DALYs as possible in a risk neutral way? If so, I do not have to recommend restricted donations. Do you have a guess for HIPF’s marginal cost-effectiveness as a fraction of that of GiveWell’s top charities? I would guess 55 as implied by CEARCH’s CEA of advocating for taxing sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs).
Impact, nuclear, and volcanic winters would decrease the number of wild animals a lot, but replacing forested area with cropland to produce more food would decrease them further.
Our grantmaking always aims at maximizing DALYS averted (with income and other stuff translated to DALYs too).
In terms of cost-effectiveness, it’s nominally 30-50x GW, but GiveWell is more rigorous in discounting, so our figures should be inflated relative to GW. Based on some internal analysis we did of GW’s greater strictness in individual line-item estimation and in the greater number of adjustments they employ, we think a more conservative estimate is that our estimates may be up to 3x inflated (i.e. something we think is 10x GW may be closer to 3x GW, which is why we use a 10x GW threshold for recommending GHD causes in the first place—to ensure that what we recommend is genuinely >GW, and moving money to the new cause area is +EV).
So my more conservative guess for our grantmaking is that it’s closer to 9-15x GW, but again I have to emphasize the high uncertainty (and riskiness, which is the inherent price we pay for these ultra high EV policy interventions).
Thanks, Joel! Do you also think your estimate that donating to Giving What We Can (GWWC) this year is 13 times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities is also 3 times as high as it should be, such that your best guess is that it is 4.33 (= 13⁄3) times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities (although there is large uncertainty)? Or is the adjustment only supposed to be applicable to CEARCH’s CEAs listed here?
Hey Vasco, the adjustment is specific to GiveWell vs us (or indeed, non-GW CEAs), since GiveWell probably is the most rigorous in discounting, while other organizations are less so, for various reasons (mainly time—that’s true for us, and why we just use a rough 10x GW threshold; and it’s true of FP too; Matt Lerner goes into detail here on the tradeoff between drilling down vs spending researcher time finding and supporting more high EV opportunities instead).
Relative to every other organization, I don’t find CEARCH to be systematically overoptimistic in the same way (at least for our deep/final round CEAs).
For our GWWC evaluation, I think the ballpark figure (robustly positive multiplier) probably still holds, but I’m uncertain about the precise figure right now, after seeing some of GWWC’s latest data (they’ll release their 2023-24 impact evaluation soon).
I have now published the post where I recommend HIPF. It looks into the cost-effectiveness of interventions accounting for soil nematodes, mites, and springtails.