Follow me on hauke.substack.com
I’m an independent researcher working on EA topics (Global Priorities Research, Longtermism, Global Catastrophic Risks, and Economics).
Follow me on hauke.substack.com
I’m an independent researcher working on EA topics (Global Priorities Research, Longtermism, Global Catastrophic Risks, and Economics).
Thanks everyone for your interesting in GWWC research.
The purpose of GWWC doing research is fourfold:
Find very effective charities/interventions and add to Givewell’s research. In the past we might have influenced Givewell’s recommendations—see: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-ky1zIxhwx_aUZiY3ZfOWplTXd2ODF5aEt2aUJOU2dKWTFV/view?usp=sharing Our niche is to specialize on global poverty charities / interventions and we hope to continue to add to the knowledge base in this area. For instance, this means that we likely will not do much in-depth research on Marijuana legalization in Vermont. We also focus more on intervention effectiveness than operations and the financials of charities (even though we do shallow investigations on this). Givewell now has 18 Full-time staff (and is expanding), but many work on the Open Philanthropy project and not that many on their top charities. There are still relatively few independent evaluators in world working on the intersection of effectiveness under ideal trial conditions (efficacy) and the effectiveness under large-scale programme conditions (effectiveness), and so I think it’s good to have more people working on this.
It’s also good to have some independent evaluation and peer-review of Givewell’s research, even in the case of highly transparent organisations such as Givewell
Provide supervision for global poverty / effectiveness research projects to highly motivated students, in order to deeply involve them with EA.
Finally, if we want to scale and grow roughly exponentially to eventually consistently move many millions to effective charities every year, it’s important to have in-house expertise to inform and fact-check our outreach and marketing, and make us credible when recommending charities to our members.
I have recently just cold-added about 10% of my FB friends who I thought might be interested in EA to the EA facebook group. Probably added about 40 people in one go. What do people think of this outreach strategy? I think it’s a pretty unintrusive soft sell that doesn’t take a lot of time and could be a good foot in the door technique.
This year we’ll have 3 summer interns for GWWC coming for 2-3 months and potentially a bit longer. Two of them will likely be substantially involved in research. I think this is somewhat representative of a typical GWWC summer internship cohort (Michelle might be able to add to this?). We also have students from the UK doing research projects with us part-time. Some are at Oxford and come in to talk in person and some we talk to over skype. I estimate that I have about 2-3 hours of meetings with them a week and then spend some time to give feedback on their research (or sometimes on their essays). We’re currently trying to scale this up and get more volunteers.
Here’s a recent report from one of our student volunteers Max on TB (which is still in manuscript form and is not published yet):
you can find more of our students writing on our blog:
When we report on our recommended charities such as the Against Malaria Foundation, we try to add to what Givewell has already researched and believe that they’ll hopefully take this into account in their future reports. For instance, here’s our new report on AMF:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-ky1zIxhwx_QVBBb3ZuaVR5dEU/view?usp=sharing
a lot of the research cited in this report has not been taken into account by Givewell I believe.
Also look at our recent report on SCI here:
where we cite research that hasn’t been taken into account by Givewell as of yet.
We’re also in contact with Givewell about their reports when we uncover errors (conceptual and factual). So far I’ve only had one email conversation with Givewell’s Jake Marcus about what I perceived as a misinterpretation about the decline in worm burden with age—but we ended up agreeing that we have different interpretation of the statistics.
Oh sorry, I think I was not clear enough on this issue. I absolutely agree with you. Givewell is quite focused on global poverty issues. I do think that Givewell spends significantly more resources on research than we do. But as you said it’s only ~9 full-time staff instead of 18 full time staff as one might think just looking at the staff page.
I think that’s the beauty of it :)
but yes maybe one could follow up after a while with a PM.
This is a great idea!
One idea I had a while ago is doing research into optimal reading. I did a quick literature review some time ago trying to find out the ideal size of fonts for fast reading, but couldn’t find any definite data. Most of the things written on speedreading seem to be completely unscientific (e.g. flashing words one by one on the screen).
An app could measure how far away you are from the screen with a webcam and then collect data on how fast you’re reading. This app could then automatically adjust the font size etc.
The idea here is not so much the app, but more that so many people are reading every day for multiple hours. Making everyone read faster (~more effective) even by 0.1% would have a lot of benefits.
Yes, good idea- I’ll try to get in touch with those students as well! Thanks Tom for the feedback!
It’s fully funded! :)
Yes, that’s a very good point! I’ll include links and flesh this out a bit.
Yes, that’s actually an important consideration. I think I’ll link to Givewell and give AMF and SCI as an example, so that people know that they will probably not win if they just write about bednet distributions or deworming.
Great question!
The impact measure will work through two different ways:
First, we’ll track how many visitors to the page we get through the email and how many sign the pledge. Second, we’ll track how many submissions we get and what the quality of those submissions is.
From a review of Peter Singer’s new book in the New York Review of Books: In holding this rationalistic view Singer departs from earlier thinkers who have promoted altruism as a social movement. Though we hear nothing of its history in this book, the belief that organized altruism can be a means of improving human life is not new. The sociologist Pitirim Sorokin (1889–1968) founded the Center for Creative Altruism at Harvard University in the late 1940s, in the belief that altruism could be organized as a force for good. Unlike Singer, Sorokin thought of altruism as concern for others motivated by love and empathy, the study of which he termed “amitology.” Sorokin did not claim to be the first to have suggested that altruism could be turned into a social movement. Correctly, he credited the idea to the French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798–1857), who in fact invented the term “altruism” (from the Latin alteri, or “others”).
An exponent of what he called positive philosophy—a system of ideas based on the belief that science alone can provide genuine knowledge—Comte created an influential movement, now largely forgotten, that in its heyday helped shape the thinking of figures such as the novelist George Eliot and the Social Darwinist theorist Herbert Spencer. Comte did not believe that altruism could be promoted simply, or even mainly, by an improvement in human powers of reasoning.1 A complex system of practices was needed, including daily rituals, which Comte propagated as part of a positivist church that he founded. Some of these practices—such as touching at regular intervals the parts of one’s skull that were associated, according to theories of phrenology that were popular at the time, with altruistic impulses—may seem eccentric today.
Singer makes no reference, here or so far as I know in any of his writings, to Comte, and he differs from the French thinker in suggesting that strong emotions of empathy may be detrimental to effective altruism. Yet there are some clear parallels between Comte’s way of thinking and Singer’s version of utilitarianism. One of the central tenets of positivism was that ethics should become a branch of science. Ethical dilemmas were soluble problems like those found in chemistry and physics. By applying the methods of science—observation, experimentation, and measurement—moral quandaries could be resolved in ways that left no room for doubt. In this positivist view moral questions had objective answers, which could be discovered by anyone who possessed the necessary knowledge and powers of reasoning. Moral disagreement could only be a result of ignorance or irrationality. [...] It may be that some good can come from effective altruism. Singer is right that some kinds of suffering—that involved in factory farming of animals, for example—are given insufficient attention in current moral thinking. Even so, a life shaped by a thin universal benevolence is an unattractive prospect. For many of us a world in which our own projects and attachments were accorded value only insofar as they enabled us to maximize the general good, where human values were subject to a test of marginal utility and the relief of suffering given overriding priority over aesthetic pleasure, would be hardly worth living in. Happily there is no reason to suppose that any such world will come into being. If history is our guide we can expect Singer’s movement for effective altruism to go the way of Comte’s church of positivism, which has passed into history as an example of the follies of philosophy.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/may/21/how-and-how-not-to-be-good/
Have already posted this on the FB group—and it’ll go up on the Giving What We Can blog after the review!
Here’s the published version of the Appendix:
The cost of fighting Malaria, Malnutrition, Neglected Tropical Diseases, and HIV/AIDS http://buff.ly/1Ksh8pX
Please share!
Of course, it takes into account the feedback—but I didn’t get that much feedback this time, so it’ll be very similar.
~80 years of life maybe (seems optimistic for these regions) but surely not ~80 DALYs in expectancy for under 5s? What about morbidity that can be expected to be had by the kids you save? Does this come into the discounting decision?
In the DALY framework, people never take into account the regional life expectancy, but a more general or sometimes even western standard life expectancy (Average worldwide life expectancy is 70 years). I think this might be justified as life expectancy is increasing world wide and because of that could even be an underestimate.
Also, Hauke, do you have an idea, personally, of the additional benefit (as a number) in terms of HIV / adult suffering / disease dynamics / reduction of health income shocks etc. etc. from reducing the incidence of malaria beyond avoiding child deaths that you helpfully walk people through in your GWWC article on malaria?
These coinfections are complex issues and all estimates are very uncertain. I review the literature around this here:
https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/blog/2015-04-24/update-against-malaria-foundation
The main point here is that, Malaria interventions are already very cost-effective even when just taking into account childhood mortality, and independent of the effect size of these interactions, you might avert some HIV infections on top the more established effects ‘for free’.
Aren’t you double-counting DALYs here? Imagine 2 charities:
Charity 1 prevents Malaria deaths in children. Charity 2 pays for the costs of living of poor people.
If Charity 1 prevents a Malaria death and then Charity 2 pays for the costs of living of the saved person, each will count each year as a DALY win per x$ donated. But they can’t both claim full credit.
Great question. Yes, you’d be double counting in this case. The DALY is not perfect, and should always be seen as just a general rough guide, and never be the sole influence for making decisions. As they say, all models are wrong, but some are useful :)
Malaria nets are unpleasant to sleep under, but it’s much better than getting malaria. I’m not aware of any studies that measure how much of a reduction in quality of life they result in, but I imagine the effect to be quite small.
The analysis is a bit more sophisticated than that:
“To avoid overestimation of the number of child deaths averted through health intervention, we take advantage of the analysis published by Wang et al (1), which examined the component of changes in child mortality that can be linked to changes in income per capita and educational attainment. Based on the econometric model used by Wang et al (1), we estimate counterfactual deaths in a scenario where income, education, and number of live births change with time but everything else is set at its year 2000 value.” See supplemental material: http://www.thelancet.com/cms/attachment/2033982751/2049751458/mmc1.pdf
Thanks everyone for your interesting in GWWC research.
The purpose of GWWC doing research is fourfold:
Find very effective charities/interventions and add to Givewell’s research. In the past we might have influenced Givewell’s recommendations—see: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-ky1zIxhwx_aUZiY3ZfOWplTXd2ODF5aEt2aUJOU2dKWTFV/view?usp=sharing Our niche is to specialize on global poverty charities / interventions and we hope to continue to add to the knowledge base in this area. For instance, this means that we likely will not do much in-depth research on Marijuana legalization in Vermont. We also focus more on intervention effectiveness than operations and the financials of charities (even though we do shallow investigations on this). Givewell now has 18 Full-time staff (and is expanding), but many work on the Open Philanthropy project and not that many on their top charities. There are still relatively few independent evaluators in world working on the intersection of effectiveness under ideal trial conditions (efficacy) and the effectiveness under large-scale programme conditions (effectiveness), and so I think it’s good to have more people working on this.
It’s also good to have some independent evaluation and peer-review of Givewell’s research, even in the case of highly transparent organisations such as Givewell
Provide supervision for global poverty / effectiveness research projects to highly motivated students, in order to deeply involve them with EA.
Finally, if we want to scale and grow roughly exponentially to eventually consistently move many millions to effective charities every year, it’s important to have in-house expertise to inform and fact-check our outreach and marketing, and make us credible when recommending charities to our members.