Thanks for putting so much thought into this topic and sharing your feedback.
I’m going to discuss the reasoning behind the “splitting” recommendation that was made in 2015, as well as our current stance, and how they relate to your points. I’ll start with the latter because I think that will make this comment easier to follow. I’ll then address some more specific points and suggestions.
I’m not addressing recommendations addressed to GiveWell—I think it will make more sense for someone more involved in GiveWell to do that—though I will address both the 2015 and 2016 decisions about how much to recommend that Good Ventures support GiveWell’s top charities, because I was closely involved in those decisions.
Current stance on Good Ventures support for GiveWell’s top charities. As noted here, we (Open Phil) currently feel that the “last dollar” probably beats GiveWell’s top charities according to our (extrapolated) values. We are quite uncertain of this view at this time and are hoping to do a more thorough investigation and writeup this year. We recommended $50 million to top charities for the 2016 giving season, for reasons laid out in that post and not discussed in the original post on this thread.
You seem to find our take on the “last dollar” a difficult-to-justify conclusion (or at least difficult to square with the fact that we are currently well under eventual peak giving, and not closing the gap via the actions you list under “symmetry”). You argue that the key issue here is the question of returns to scale, and say that we should regrant to larger organizations if we think returns are increasing, and smaller organizations if returns are decreasing. But I don’t think the question “Are returns to scale increasing or decreasing?” is a particularly core question here (nor does it have a single general answer). Instead, our reason for thinking our “last dollar” can beat top charities and many other options is largely bound up in our model of ourselves as people who aspire to become “experts” in the domain of giving away large amounts of money effectively and according to the basic stance of effective altruism. I’ve written about my model of broad market efficiency in the past; I don’t think it is trivial to “beat the market,” but nor do I think it is prohibitively difficult, and I expect that we can do so in the long run. Another key part of the view is that there is more than one plausible worldview under which it looks (in the long run) quite tractable to spend essentially arbitrary amounts of money in a way that has better value for money than top charities (this is also discussed in the post on our current view ).
Previously, our best guess was different. We thought that the “last dollar” was worse than top charities—but not much worse, and with very low confidence. We fully funded things we thought were much better than the “last dollar” (including certain top charities grants) but not things we thought were relatively close when they also posed coordination issues. For this case, fully funding top charities would have had pros and cons relative to splitting: we think the dollars we spent would’ve done slightly more good, but the dollars spent by others would’ve done less good (and we think we have a good sense of the counterfactual for most of those dollars). We guessed that the latter outweighed the former.
I think that an important factor playing into both decisions, and a potentially key factor causing you and me to see things differently, pertains to conservatism. For the 2015 decision in particular, we didn’t have much time to think carefully about these issues, and “fully funding” might be the kind of thing we couldn’t easily walk back (we worried about a consistent dynamic in which our entering a cause led to other donors’ immediately fleeing it). It’s often the case that when we need to make high-stakes decisions without sufficient time or information, we err on the side of preserving option value and avoiding particularly bad outcomes (especially those that pose risks to GiveWell or Open Phil as an organization); this often leads to “hacky” actions that are knowably not ideal for any particular set of facts and values, if we had confidently sorted these facts and values out (but we haven’t).
Responses to more specific points
“First, the adversarial framing here seems unnecessary. If the other player hasn’t started defecting in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma, why start?”
I don’t think this is a case of “defecting” or “adversarial framing.” We were trying to approximate the outcome we would’ve reached if we’d been able to have a friendly, open discussion and coordination with individual donors, which we couldn’t.
“if you take into account the difference in scale between Good Ventures and other GiveWell donors, Good Ventures’s ‘fair share’ seems more likely to be in excess of 80%, than a 50-50 split.”
We expected individual giving to grow over time, and thought that it would grow less if we had a policy of fully funding top charities. Calculating “fair share” based on current giving alone, as opposed to giving capacity construed more broadly and over a longer-term, would have created the kinds of problematic incentives we wrote that we were worried about. 50% is within range of what I’d guess would be a long-term fair share. Given that it is within range, 50% was chosen as a proportion that would (accurately) signal that we had chosen it fairly arbitrarily, in order to commit credibly to splitting, as mentioned in the post.
“This ethical objection doesn’t make sense. It implies that it’s unethical to cooperate on the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma.” The ethical objection was to being misleading, not to the game-theoretic aspects of the approach.
I don’t follow your argument under “Influence via habituation vs track record.” The reason there was “not enough money to cover the whole thing” was because we were unwilling to pay more than what we considered our fair share, due to the incentives it would create and the long-run implications for total positive impact. We were open about that. I also think that the “surface case” for low-engagement donors who didn’t read our work was about as close to the truth as a surface case could be. (I would describe the “surface case” as something like: “If I give this money, then bednets will be delivered; if I do not, that will not happen.” I do not believe that the majority of GiveWell donors—including very large donors—base their giving on Open Phil’s opinions, or in many cases even know what Open Phil is.) I don’t see how this situation implies any of your #1-#3, and I don’t see how it is deceptive.
“Access via size” and “Independence via many funders” were not part of our reasoning.
Thoughts on your recommendations. I appreciate your making suggestions, and providing helpful context on the spirit in which you intend them. Here I only address suggestions for Open Phil.
Maintaining a list of open investigations: I see some case for this, but at the moment we don’t plan on it. I don’t think we can succinctly and efficiently maintain such a list without incurring a number of risks (e.g., causing people to excessively plan on our support; causing controversy due to hasty communication or miscommunication). Instead, we encourage people who want to know whether we’re working on something to contact us and ask.
We have considered and in some cases done some (limited) execution on all of the suggestions you make under “Symmetry,” and all remain potential tools if we want to ramp up giving further in the future. I think they are all good ideas, perhaps things we should have done more of already, and perhaps things we will do more of later on. However, I do not think the situation is “symmetrical” as you imply because our mission—which we are building up expertise and capacity around optimizing for—is giving away large sums of money effectively and according to the basic stance of effective altruism. The same is not generally true of our grantees. We generally try to do something approximating “give to grantees up until the point where marginal dollars would be worse than our last dollar” (though of course very imprecisely and with many additional considerations. Finally, I’ll add that any of the four options you list—and many more—are things we could probably find a way of doing if we put in some time and internal discussion, resulting in good outcomes. But we think that time and internal discussion is better spent on other priorities that will lead to better outcomes. In general, any new idea we pursue involves a fair amount of discussion and refinement, which itself has major opportunity costs, so we accept a degree of inertia in our policies and approaches.
For reasons stated above and in previous posts, I don’t believe the optimal level of funding for top charities is 100% of the gap or 0%. I also wish to note that your comment “I expect fairly few donors would accept this offer. But it still seems like it would be a powerful, credible signal of cooperative intent.” highlights what I suspect may be one of the most important disagreements underlying this discussion. As noted above, we are comfortable with “hacky” approaches to dilemmas that let us move on to our next priority, and we are very unlikely to undertake time-consuming projects with little expected impact other than to signal cooperative intent in a general and undirected way. For us, a disagreement whose importance is mostly symbolic is not likely to become a priority. We would be more likely to prioritize disagreements that implied we could do much more good (or much less harm) if we took some action, such that this action is competitive with our other priorities.
I think your final suggestion would have substantial costs, and don’t agree that you’ve identified sufficient harms to consider it.
I’m not sure I’ve understood all of your points, but hopefully this is helpful in identifying which threads would be useful to pursue further. Thanks again for your thoughtful feedback.
Thanks for the detailed response! I wanted to quickly point out something you did here that I think is good practice, and wish more people did:
“Access via size” and “Independence via many funders” were not part of our reasoning.
Marking which parts of someone’s argument you think are relevant and which you think aren’t—and, relatedly, which branches of a disjunction you accept and which you reject—are an important part of how arguments can lead to shared models. A lot of people neglect this sort of thing, because it’s not a clear way to score points for their side. You took care to address it here. Thanks.
(More to follow when I’ve had time to take this in.)
Hi Ben,
Thanks for putting so much thought into this topic and sharing your feedback.
I’m going to discuss the reasoning behind the “splitting” recommendation that was made in 2015, as well as our current stance, and how they relate to your points. I’ll start with the latter because I think that will make this comment easier to follow. I’ll then address some more specific points and suggestions.
I’m not addressing recommendations addressed to GiveWell—I think it will make more sense for someone more involved in GiveWell to do that—though I will address both the 2015 and 2016 decisions about how much to recommend that Good Ventures support GiveWell’s top charities, because I was closely involved in those decisions.
Current stance on Good Ventures support for GiveWell’s top charities. As noted here, we (Open Phil) currently feel that the “last dollar” probably beats GiveWell’s top charities according to our (extrapolated) values. We are quite uncertain of this view at this time and are hoping to do a more thorough investigation and writeup this year. We recommended $50 million to top charities for the 2016 giving season, for reasons laid out in that post and not discussed in the original post on this thread.
You seem to find our take on the “last dollar” a difficult-to-justify conclusion (or at least difficult to square with the fact that we are currently well under eventual peak giving, and not closing the gap via the actions you list under “symmetry”). You argue that the key issue here is the question of returns to scale, and say that we should regrant to larger organizations if we think returns are increasing, and smaller organizations if returns are decreasing. But I don’t think the question “Are returns to scale increasing or decreasing?” is a particularly core question here (nor does it have a single general answer). Instead, our reason for thinking our “last dollar” can beat top charities and many other options is largely bound up in our model of ourselves as people who aspire to become “experts” in the domain of giving away large amounts of money effectively and according to the basic stance of effective altruism. I’ve written about my model of broad market efficiency in the past; I don’t think it is trivial to “beat the market,” but nor do I think it is prohibitively difficult, and I expect that we can do so in the long run. Another key part of the view is that there is more than one plausible worldview under which it looks (in the long run) quite tractable to spend essentially arbitrary amounts of money in a way that has better value for money than top charities (this is also discussed in the post on our current view ).
Previously, our best guess was different. We thought that the “last dollar” was worse than top charities—but not much worse, and with very low confidence. We fully funded things we thought were much better than the “last dollar” (including certain top charities grants) but not things we thought were relatively close when they also posed coordination issues. For this case, fully funding top charities would have had pros and cons relative to splitting: we think the dollars we spent would’ve done slightly more good, but the dollars spent by others would’ve done less good (and we think we have a good sense of the counterfactual for most of those dollars). We guessed that the latter outweighed the former.
I think that an important factor playing into both decisions, and a potentially key factor causing you and me to see things differently, pertains to conservatism. For the 2015 decision in particular, we didn’t have much time to think carefully about these issues, and “fully funding” might be the kind of thing we couldn’t easily walk back (we worried about a consistent dynamic in which our entering a cause led to other donors’ immediately fleeing it). It’s often the case that when we need to make high-stakes decisions without sufficient time or information, we err on the side of preserving option value and avoiding particularly bad outcomes (especially those that pose risks to GiveWell or Open Phil as an organization); this often leads to “hacky” actions that are knowably not ideal for any particular set of facts and values, if we had confidently sorted these facts and values out (but we haven’t).
Responses to more specific points
“First, the adversarial framing here seems unnecessary. If the other player hasn’t started defecting in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma, why start?”
I don’t think this is a case of “defecting” or “adversarial framing.” We were trying to approximate the outcome we would’ve reached if we’d been able to have a friendly, open discussion and coordination with individual donors, which we couldn’t.
“if you take into account the difference in scale between Good Ventures and other GiveWell donors, Good Ventures’s ‘fair share’ seems more likely to be in excess of 80%, than a 50-50 split.”
We expected individual giving to grow over time, and thought that it would grow less if we had a policy of fully funding top charities. Calculating “fair share” based on current giving alone, as opposed to giving capacity construed more broadly and over a longer-term, would have created the kinds of problematic incentives we wrote that we were worried about. 50% is within range of what I’d guess would be a long-term fair share. Given that it is within range, 50% was chosen as a proportion that would (accurately) signal that we had chosen it fairly arbitrarily, in order to commit credibly to splitting, as mentioned in the post.
“This ethical objection doesn’t make sense. It implies that it’s unethical to cooperate on the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma.” The ethical objection was to being misleading, not to the game-theoretic aspects of the approach.
I don’t follow your argument under “Influence via habituation vs track record.” The reason there was “not enough money to cover the whole thing” was because we were unwilling to pay more than what we considered our fair share, due to the incentives it would create and the long-run implications for total positive impact. We were open about that. I also think that the “surface case” for low-engagement donors who didn’t read our work was about as close to the truth as a surface case could be. (I would describe the “surface case” as something like: “If I give this money, then bednets will be delivered; if I do not, that will not happen.” I do not believe that the majority of GiveWell donors—including very large donors—base their giving on Open Phil’s opinions, or in many cases even know what Open Phil is.) I don’t see how this situation implies any of your #1-#3, and I don’t see how it is deceptive.
“Access via size” and “Independence via many funders” were not part of our reasoning.
(Continued in next comment)
(Continued from previous comment)
Thoughts on your recommendations. I appreciate your making suggestions, and providing helpful context on the spirit in which you intend them. Here I only address suggestions for Open Phil.
Maintaining a list of open investigations: I see some case for this, but at the moment we don’t plan on it. I don’t think we can succinctly and efficiently maintain such a list without incurring a number of risks (e.g., causing people to excessively plan on our support; causing controversy due to hasty communication or miscommunication). Instead, we encourage people who want to know whether we’re working on something to contact us and ask.
We have considered and in some cases done some (limited) execution on all of the suggestions you make under “Symmetry,” and all remain potential tools if we want to ramp up giving further in the future. I think they are all good ideas, perhaps things we should have done more of already, and perhaps things we will do more of later on. However, I do not think the situation is “symmetrical” as you imply because our mission—which we are building up expertise and capacity around optimizing for—is giving away large sums of money effectively and according to the basic stance of effective altruism. The same is not generally true of our grantees. We generally try to do something approximating “give to grantees up until the point where marginal dollars would be worse than our last dollar” (though of course very imprecisely and with many additional considerations. Finally, I’ll add that any of the four options you list—and many more—are things we could probably find a way of doing if we put in some time and internal discussion, resulting in good outcomes. But we think that time and internal discussion is better spent on other priorities that will lead to better outcomes. In general, any new idea we pursue involves a fair amount of discussion and refinement, which itself has major opportunity costs, so we accept a degree of inertia in our policies and approaches.
For reasons stated above and in previous posts, I don’t believe the optimal level of funding for top charities is 100% of the gap or 0%. I also wish to note that your comment “I expect fairly few donors would accept this offer. But it still seems like it would be a powerful, credible signal of cooperative intent.” highlights what I suspect may be one of the most important disagreements underlying this discussion. As noted above, we are comfortable with “hacky” approaches to dilemmas that let us move on to our next priority, and we are very unlikely to undertake time-consuming projects with little expected impact other than to signal cooperative intent in a general and undirected way. For us, a disagreement whose importance is mostly symbolic is not likely to become a priority. We would be more likely to prioritize disagreements that implied we could do much more good (or much less harm) if we took some action, such that this action is competitive with our other priorities.
I think your final suggestion would have substantial costs, and don’t agree that you’ve identified sufficient harms to consider it.
I’m not sure I’ve understood all of your points, but hopefully this is helpful in identifying which threads would be useful to pursue further. Thanks again for your thoughtful feedback.
Thanks for the detailed response! I wanted to quickly point out something you did here that I think is good practice, and wish more people did:
Marking which parts of someone’s argument you think are relevant and which you think aren’t—and, relatedly, which branches of a disjunction you accept and which you reject—are an important part of how arguments can lead to shared models. A lot of people neglect this sort of thing, because it’s not a clear way to score points for their side. You took care to address it here. Thanks.
(More to follow when I’ve had time to take this in.)