I think it’s a travesty that so many valuable analyses are never publicly shared, but due to unreasonable external expectations it’s currently hard for any single organization to become more transparent without occurring enormous costs.
I think this applies to organisations with uncertain funding, but not Open Philanthropy, which is essentially funded by a billionaire quite aligned with their strategy?
The internal analyses from open phil I’ve been privileged to see were pretty good. They were also made by humans, who make errors all the time.
Even if the analyses do not contain errors per se, it would be nice to get clarity on morals. I wonder whether Open Philanthropy’s prioritisation among human and animal welfare interventions in their global health and wellbeing (GHW) portfolio considers 1 unit of welfare in humans as valuable as 1 unit of welfare in animals. It does not look like so, as I estimate the cost-effectiveness of corporate campaigns for chicken welfare is 680 times Open Philanthropy’s GHW bar.
The costs for Open Phil to reduce the error rate of analyses, would not be worth the benefits.
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Criticism shouldn’t have to warrant a response if it takes time away from work which is more important.
On the one hand, I agree it is important to be mindful of the time it would take to improve decisions. On the other, I think it would be quite worth it for Open Philanthropy to have the main text of the write-ups of its millionaire grants longer than 1 paragraph, and to explain how they prioritise between human and animal interventions. Hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake in these decisions. Open Philanthropy also has great researchers which could (relatively) quickly provide adequate context for their decisions. My sense is that transparency is not among Open Philanthropy’s priorities.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply, Mathias!
I think this applies to organisations with uncertain funding, but not Open Philanthropy, which is essentially funded by a billionaire quite aligned with their strategy?
Even if the analyses do not contain errors per se, it would be nice to get clarity on morals. I wonder whether Open Philanthropy’s prioritisation among human and animal welfare interventions in their global health and wellbeing (GHW) portfolio considers 1 unit of welfare in humans as valuable as 1 unit of welfare in animals. It does not look like so, as I estimate the cost-effectiveness of corporate campaigns for chicken welfare is 680 times Open Philanthropy’s GHW bar.
On the one hand, I agree it is important to be mindful of the time it would take to improve decisions. On the other, I think it would be quite worth it for Open Philanthropy to have the main text of the write-ups of its millionaire grants longer than 1 paragraph, and to explain how they prioritise between human and animal interventions. Hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake in these decisions. Open Philanthropy also has great researchers which could (relatively) quickly provide adequate context for their decisions. My sense is that transparency is not among Open Philanthropy’s priorities.
Transparency also facilates productive criticism.