What’s unique about these grants?: These grants are a good illustration of how GiveWell is applying increased flexibility, speed, and risk tolerance to respond to urgent needs caused by recent cuts to US foreign assistance. Funded by our All Grants Fund, the grants also demonstrate how GiveWell has broadened its research scope beyond its Top Charities while maintaining its disciplined approach—comparing each new opportunity to established interventions, like malaria prevention or vitamin A supplementation, as part of its grantmaking decisions.
The grants were explicitly made from the all grants fund, which is the place people donate when they are happy for GiveWell to make riskier decisions and hold themselves to lower standards than for top charities. I personally donate to the all grants fund over the top charities fund, am a fan of a more risk tolerant approach, and I’m happy to defer to GiveWell’s judgement. I think your post is holding this grant to the standard of a top charity, which I think is unreasonable and would not be worth the effort and expense of GiveWell staff time
I don’t have too much context on the actual object details of the grant, so don’t have strong takes on most of your criticisms (you definitely know more about this domain than me!). But I find it pretty plausible that lots of high importance decisions get made after a disaster like the USAID cuts, and that this was urgent. And I also expect that there are, in general, a bunch of grants that are time sensitive in response to the USAID cuts and endorse GiveWell moving fast here and maximising expected value.
Related to this point, I was surprised to see this
Given that GiveWell’s All Grants Fund has basically the same graph
Many other grants from the All Grants Fund don’t have a ton of evidence behind them and are exploratory. As an example, they funded part of an RCT on building trailbridges in Rwanda, with reasoning «While our best guess is that bridges are below the range of cost-effectiveness of programs we would recommend funding, we think there’s a reasonable chance the findings of the RCT update us toward believing this program is above our bar. [...]» and an RCT on providing eyeglasses for similar reasons.
Hey Lorenzo thanks for this that’s a good point and I had somehow missed that graph which you are right is hilariously similar to mine!
I didn’t get into the nuance in the article, but I think that the All Grants fund still provides a high amount of certainty for most of their grants. This is how GiveWell puts it.
“The All Grants Fund provides grants to our Top Charities as well as grants to incubate newer programs, promote policy change, fund relevant research, or support other potentially high-impact, cost-effective initiatives that don’t fit neat categorization.
The All Grants Fund supports the highest-impact opportunities we can identify in global health and well-being. This may include some grants with high expected value that carry a higher risk of not achieving their potential impact.′
Funding through the all grants fund mostly (not all) falls into 2 categories.
Grants that still have a high level of evidence behind them, but just not as much as the top charities. Most even have RCT to evidence behind them.
Evidence generation for promising interventions. The rail intervention you suggested falls largely into this category.
I see this particular TSU grant as moving somewhat away from even the All Grants philosophy as there is really not much evidence at all that TSUs work, and this grant is also not evidence generating at least as it seems at the moment.
When I read that description I infer “make the best decision we can under uncertainty”, not “only make decisions with a decent standard of evidence or to gather more evidence”. It’s a reasonable position to think that the TSUs grant is a bad idea or that it would be unreasonable to expect it to be a good idea without further evidence, but I feel like GiveWell are pretty clear that they’re fine with making high risk grants, and in this case they seem to think this TSUs will be high expected value
Yeah based on the evidence of what GiveWell actually have given most grants to in the past I would have gone with this as what I think GiveWell meant and what I would personally like the most.
“only make decisions with a decent standard of evidence or to gather more evidence”
I think it makes sense to have separation, and have Openphil in doing higher risk bets undet your heuristic of “make the best decision we can under uncertainty”. Why have 2 different bodies doing the same thing with largely the same pool of money?
But yes you might be right that at least now maybe both GiveWell and Open Phil are meaning and doing that.
Fair enough, I guess my take from all this is that you mainly just want the all grants fund to have a different philosophy than the one GiveWell is following in practice? Or do you also think they’re making a mistake by their own lights?
I just originally thought that the All Grants fund has stuff with a decent evidence base, but less certainty then the top charities. So still more certainty than most other funders in the world.
Nearly all of the charities there would fit that description so I think they were following that practice. So yes I thought they were making a mistake somewhat by their own lights, or maybe taking the fund in a bit of a different direction.
Or Maybe I was just wrong about what they were trying to do.
And I expect this to increasingly be the case in the future, as GiveWell finds new donors and OpenPhil finds other things to donate to. So I wouldn’t say it’s “largely the same pool of money”
Agreed. GiveWell also takes outside donors and OpenPhil doesn’t. I’ve donated to the all grants fund because I wanted to help with risk tolerant and fast giving after the aid cuts, and am glad the opportunity exists
The grants were explicitly made from the all grants fund, which is the place people donate when they are happy for GiveWell to make riskier decisions and hold themselves to lower standards than for top charities. I personally donate to the all grants fund over the top charities fund, am a fan of a more risk tolerant approach, and I’m happy to defer to GiveWell’s judgement. I think your post is holding this grant to the standard of a top charity, which I think is unreasonable and would not be worth the effort and expense of GiveWell staff time
I don’t have too much context on the actual object details of the grant, so don’t have strong takes on most of your criticisms (you definitely know more about this domain than me!). But I find it pretty plausible that lots of high importance decisions get made after a disaster like the USAID cuts, and that this was urgent. And I also expect that there are, in general, a bunch of grants that are time sensitive in response to the USAID cuts and endorse GiveWell moving fast here and maximising expected value.
Related to this point, I was surprised to see this
Given that GiveWell’s All Grants Fund has basically the same graph
Many other grants from the All Grants Fund don’t have a ton of evidence behind them and are exploratory. As an example, they funded part of an RCT on building trailbridges in Rwanda, with reasoning «While our best guess is that bridges are below the range of cost-effectiveness of programs we would recommend funding, we think there’s a reasonable chance the findings of the RCT update us toward believing this program is above our bar. [...]» and an RCT on providing eyeglasses for similar reasons.
Hey Lorenzo thanks for this that’s a good point and I had somehow missed that graph which you are right is hilariously similar to mine!
I didn’t get into the nuance in the article, but I think that the All Grants fund still provides a high amount of certainty for most of their grants. This is how GiveWell puts it.
“The All Grants Fund provides grants to our Top Charities as well as grants to incubate newer programs, promote policy change, fund relevant research, or support other potentially high-impact, cost-effective initiatives that don’t fit neat categorization.
The All Grants Fund supports the highest-impact opportunities we can identify in global health and well-being. This may include some grants with high expected value that carry a higher risk of not achieving their potential impact.′
Funding through the all grants fund mostly (not all) falls into 2 categories.
Grants that still have a high level of evidence behind them, but just not as much as the top charities. Most even have RCT to evidence behind them.
Evidence generation for promising interventions. The rail intervention you suggested falls largely into this category.
I see this particular TSU grant as moving somewhat away from even the All Grants philosophy as there is really not much evidence at all that TSUs work, and this grant is also not evidence generating at least as it seems at the moment.
When I read that description I infer “make the best decision we can under uncertainty”, not “only make decisions with a decent standard of evidence or to gather more evidence”. It’s a reasonable position to think that the TSUs grant is a bad idea or that it would be unreasonable to expect it to be a good idea without further evidence, but I feel like GiveWell are pretty clear that they’re fine with making high risk grants, and in this case they seem to think this TSUs will be high expected value
Yeah based on the evidence of what GiveWell actually have given most grants to in the past I would have gone with this as what I think GiveWell meant and what I would personally like the most.
“only make decisions with a decent standard of evidence or to gather more evidence”
I think it makes sense to have separation, and have Openphil in doing higher risk bets undet your heuristic of “make the best decision we can under uncertainty”. Why have 2 different bodies doing the same thing with largely the same pool of money?
But yes you might be right that at least now maybe both GiveWell and Open Phil are meaning and doing that.
Fair enough, I guess my take from all this is that you mainly just want the all grants fund to have a different philosophy than the one GiveWell is following in practice? Or do you also think they’re making a mistake by their own lights?
I just originally thought that the All Grants fund has stuff with a decent evidence base, but less certainty then the top charities. So still more certainty than most other funders in the world.
Nearly all of the charities there would fit that description so I think they were following that practice. So yes I thought they were making a mistake somewhat by their own lights, or maybe taking the fund in a bit of a different direction.
Or Maybe I was just wrong about what they were trying to do.
It doesn’t apply to the TSU grant, but note that a high percentage of GiveWell-directed donations don’t come from OpenPhilanthropy:
And I expect this to increasingly be the case in the future, as GiveWell finds new donors and OpenPhil finds other things to donate to. So I wouldn’t say it’s “largely the same pool of money”
Agreed. GiveWell also takes outside donors and OpenPhil doesn’t. I’ve donated to the all grants fund because I wanted to help with risk tolerant and fast giving after the aid cuts, and am glad the opportunity exists
I don’t think that’s true anymore: https://www.openphilanthropy.org/partner-with-us/ but I imagine OpenPhil only takes donors above a certain size (here they say >$1M/year) while GiveWell takes donations of all sizes