Interestingly, of the 44 people who ranked every charity, the candidates with most last-placed votes were: PauseAI = 10, VidaPlena = ARMoR = 5, Whylome = 4, SWP = AMF = Arthropoda = 3, … . This is mostly just noise I’m guessing, except perhaps that it is some evidence PauseAI is unusually polarising and a surprisingly large minority of people think it is especially bad (net negative, perhaps).
Also here is the distribution of how many candidates people ranked:
I am a bit surprised there were so many people who voted for none of the winning charities—I would have thought most people would have some preference between the top few candidates, and that if their favourite charity wasn’t going to win they would prefer to still choose between the main contenders. Maybe people just voted once initially and then didn’t update it based on which candidates had a chance of winning.
The all-completers are very likely not representative of the larger group of voters, but it’s still interesting to see the trends there. I find it curious that a number of orgs that received lots of positive votes (and/​or ranked higher than I would have expected in the IRV finish) also received lots of last-place votes among all-voters.
PauseAI US isn’t surprising to me given that the comments suggest a wide range of opinions on its work, from pivotal to net negative. There were fewer votes in 34th to 38th place, which is a difference from some other orgs that got multiple last-place votes.
I’m guessing people who put Arthropoda and SWP last don’t think invertebrate welfare should be a cause area, and that people who voted AMF last are really worried about the meat-eater problem. It was notable and surprising to me that 16 of the 52 voters who voted 34+ orgs had AMF in 34th place or worse.
For Vida Plena, I speculate that some voters had a negative opinion on VP’s group psychotherapy intervention based on the StrongMinds/​HLI-related discussions about the effect size of group psychotherapy in 2022 & 2023, and this caused them to rank VP below orgs on which they felt they had no real information or opinion. I’m not aware of any criticism of VP as an org, at least on the Forum. There are a lot of 34th to 38th place votes for Vida Plena as well (of 52 who voted at least 34 orgs, 32 had VP in one of these slots).
I don’t know enough about ARMoR or Whylome to even speculate.
It’s an interesting pattern. It does appear like Kaya Guides and Vida Plena got a pretty equal number of partial votes, suggesting that people favourable to those areas ranked them equally highly. But among completers, Vida Plena got a lot of lower votes—even more so than ACTRA! Given that ACTRA is very new, I think they make a good control group, which to me implies something like ‘completers think Vida Plena is likely to be less favourable than the average unknown mental health charity’.
Your hypothesis makes sense to me; many in the EA community don’t know the specifics of Vida Plena’s program or its potential for high cost-effectiveness, probably due to previous concerns around HLI’s evaluations. I personally think this is unfounded, and clearly many partial voters agree, as Vida Plena ranked quite highly even if you assume that some number of these partial voters sorted by a GHD focus and only voted for GHD charities (higher than us!).
Thanks for sharing the raw data!
Interestingly, of the 44 people who ranked every charity, the candidates with most last-placed votes were: PauseAI = 10, VidaPlena = ARMoR = 5, Whylome = 4, SWP = AMF = Arthropoda = 3, … . This is mostly just noise I’m guessing, except perhaps that it is some evidence PauseAI is unusually polarising and a surprisingly large minority of people think it is especially bad (net negative, perhaps).
Also here is the distribution of how many candidates people ranked:
I am a bit surprised there were so many people who voted for none of the winning charities—I would have thought most people would have some preference between the top few candidates, and that if their favourite charity wasn’t going to win they would prefer to still choose between the main contenders. Maybe people just voted once initially and then didn’t update it based on which candidates had a chance of winning.
The all-completers are very likely not representative of the larger group of voters, but it’s still interesting to see the trends there. I find it curious that a number of orgs that received lots of positive votes (and/​or ranked higher than I would have expected in the IRV finish) also received lots of last-place votes among all-voters.
PauseAI US isn’t surprising to me given that the comments suggest a wide range of opinions on its work, from pivotal to net negative. There were fewer votes in 34th to 38th place, which is a difference from some other orgs that got multiple last-place votes.
I’m guessing people who put Arthropoda and SWP last don’t think invertebrate welfare should be a cause area, and that people who voted AMF last are really worried about the meat-eater problem. It was notable and surprising to me that 16 of the 52 voters who voted 34+ orgs had AMF in 34th place or worse.
For Vida Plena, I speculate that some voters had a negative opinion on VP’s group psychotherapy intervention based on the StrongMinds/​HLI-related discussions about the effect size of group psychotherapy in 2022 & 2023, and this caused them to rank VP below orgs on which they felt they had no real information or opinion. I’m not aware of any criticism of VP as an org, at least on the Forum. There are a lot of 34th to 38th place votes for Vida Plena as well (of 52 who voted at least 34 orgs, 32 had VP in one of these slots).
I don’t know enough about ARMoR or Whylome to even speculate.
I was curious about the thing with Vida Plena too (since I work for Kaya Guides, and we’re generally friendly). I cooked up a quick data explorer for the three mental health charities:
It’s an interesting pattern. It does appear like Kaya Guides and Vida Plena got a pretty equal number of partial votes, suggesting that people favourable to those areas ranked them equally highly. But among completers, Vida Plena got a lot of lower votes—even more so than ACTRA! Given that ACTRA is very new, I think they make a good control group, which to me implies something like ‘completers think Vida Plena is likely to be less favourable than the average unknown mental health charity’.
Your hypothesis makes sense to me; many in the EA community don’t know the specifics of Vida Plena’s program or its potential for high cost-effectiveness, probably due to previous concerns around HLI’s evaluations. I personally think this is unfounded, and clearly many partial voters agree, as Vida Plena ranked quite highly even if you assume that some number of these partial voters sorted by a GHD focus and only voted for GHD charities (higher than us!).