In an ideal world we’d have intense evaluations of all organizations that are specific to all possible uses, done in communications styles relevant to all people.
Unfortunately this is an impossible amount of work, so we have to find some messy shortcuts that get much of the benefit at a decent cost.
I’m not sure how to best focus longtermist organization evaluations to maximize gains for a diversity of types of decisions. Fortunately I think whenever one makes an evaluation for one specific thing (funding decisions), these wind up relevant for other things (career decisions, organization decisions).
My primary interest at this point are evaluations of the following:
How much total impact is an organization having, positive or negative?
How can such impact be improved?
How efficient is the organization (in terms of money and talent)
How valuable is it to other groups or individuals to read / engage with the work of this organization? (Think Yelp or Amazon reviews)
My guess is that such investigations will help answer a wide assortment of different questions.
To echo what Nuño said, some of my interest in this specific task was in attempting a fairly general-purpose attempt. I think that increasingly substantial attempts is a pretty good bet, because a whole lot could either go wrong (this work upsets some group or includes falsities) or new ideas could be figured out (particularly by commenters, such as those on this post).
In the longer term my preference isn’t for QURI/Nuño to be doing the majority of public evaluations of longtermist orgs, but instead for others to do most of this work. Perhaps this could be something of a standard blog post type, and/or there could be 1-2 small organizations dedicated to it. I think it really should be done independently from other large orgs (to be less biased and more isolated), so it probably wouldn’t make sense for this work to be done as part of a much bigger organization.
Also, I’d agree that <$1Mil funding decisions aren’t the main thing I’m interested in. I think that talent and larger allocations are much more exciting.
For example, perhaps it’s realized that one small nonprofit’s work is much more valuable than expected, so future donors wind up spending $200Mil in related work down the line. Or, there are many systematic effects, like new founders are inspired by trends identified in the evaluations and make better new nonprofits because of it.
+1, to both the questions and the answers.
In an ideal world we’d have intense evaluations of all organizations that are specific to all possible uses, done in communications styles relevant to all people.
Unfortunately this is an impossible amount of work, so we have to find some messy shortcuts that get much of the benefit at a decent cost.
I’m not sure how to best focus longtermist organization evaluations to maximize gains for a diversity of types of decisions. Fortunately I think whenever one makes an evaluation for one specific thing (funding decisions), these wind up relevant for other things (career decisions, organization decisions).
My primary interest at this point are evaluations of the following:
How much total impact is an organization having, positive or negative?
How can such impact be improved?
How efficient is the organization (in terms of money and talent)
How valuable is it to other groups or individuals to read / engage with the work of this organization? (Think Yelp or Amazon reviews)
My guess is that such investigations will help answer a wide assortment of different questions.
To echo what Nuño said, some of my interest in this specific task was in attempting a fairly general-purpose attempt. I think that increasingly substantial attempts is a pretty good bet, because a whole lot could either go wrong (this work upsets some group or includes falsities) or new ideas could be figured out (particularly by commenters, such as those on this post).
In the longer term my preference isn’t for QURI/Nuño to be doing the majority of public evaluations of longtermist orgs, but instead for others to do most of this work. Perhaps this could be something of a standard blog post type, and/or there could be 1-2 small organizations dedicated to it. I think it really should be done independently from other large orgs (to be less biased and more isolated), so it probably wouldn’t make sense for this work to be done as part of a much bigger organization.
Also, I’d agree that <$1Mil funding decisions aren’t the main thing I’m interested in. I think that talent and larger allocations are much more exciting.
For example, perhaps it’s realized that one small nonprofit’s work is much more valuable than expected, so future donors wind up spending $200Mil in related work down the line. Or, there are many systematic effects, like new founders are inspired by trends identified in the evaluations and make better new nonprofits because of it.