You may be interested to know that GiveWell didn’t start out as a GHD evaluator. The initial idea was to evaluate many different cause areas, including economic opportunity and education. But I think what happened is that once they had compiled the research, donors saw that the GHD stuff was like 10,000× more cost effective, so the other cause areas didn’t attract much money moved and in 2012 they shut the other cause areas down. 2009 was the year GiveWell discovered AMF, and other than that, their 2009 top charities list is pretty unrecognizable.
Ian Turner
Karma: 1,383
It sounds like you are struggling with whether it is better to have true belief or comforting ones. Maybe you can take comfort in knowing this is not a new dilemma! As early utilitarian John Stuart Mill wrote, “better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.”
I think partly this is a reaction to dishonest charity fundraising communications that say things like “Donate today and your gift will be matched 8×”, when in reality either the match limit is virtually guaranteed to met or else the matching donor would offset any unused matching funds with a separate donation.
So consider your last sentence — maybe if I do the thing you will give an extra $100 at the end of the year or if I don’t do the thing you will give an extra $150 at the end of the year. Technically I only gave the $50 gift if you did the thing, but in reality there was no counterfactual difference in total giving.
I notice there was no attempt at a BOTEC here and my impression is that the harms from PFAS are extremely marginal. Have you attempted to calculate how many lives could be saved even by completely eliminating PFAS?
We’ve started the process of creating a brand new codebase for the forum
Do you mind writing some words about why the EA forum needs to have its own codebase, as opposed to use one of the approximately 10,000 pre-existing web forum software packages?
I certainly think being an evaluator is hard; but I was referring to the difficulty of choosing an evaluator.
GiveWell is able to provide extremely transparent and legible background to all their grants and recommendations, which makes it very easy to trust their decisionmaking. Essentially, I am confident that GiveWell is doing a good job at their recommendations because (a) I dug carefully into their reasoning and it holds up very well, even the parts that I validated independently/personally, and (b) it’s relatively easy to verify the claims made by GiveWell’s critics (at least with respect to GiveWell).
In politics, I don’t really think any of that applies. It’s inherently adversarial, which among other things means a good evaluator can’t really be fully transparent: Much of the most important information is shared in private. Sure Eric Neyman exists; but as an outsider I don’t really see how to validate his work in the way that I can with GiveWell. And if an evaluator of political donations were to accumulate a lot of followers, they would in turn become a target of political operatives that would limit their ability to maneuver.
I know a lobbyist personally and while he’s able to give me a lot more candor than would be possible in public, I still don’t really feel like I have a good sense of how effective his work is as a whole. Working with a stranger would be even tougher.
My sense is that this is absolutely true:
election campaign contributions might be a way in which you can have a substantial impact as a small donor
However, I also get the sense that it’s quite hard, in a way that (for example) following GiveWell recommendations isn’t. Politics is highly anti-inductive and it’s really hard to know how and where to give, and even in retrospect it can often be hard to tell if one’s donations made a difference.
Personally I stay away from political donations just because I feel like I don’t understand it well, and getting that understanding is really quite difficult. It’s hard to have true beliefs about politics for a variety of reasons.
I think the claim is that while this intervention wasn’t as cost effective as we thought, it’s still more cost effective than most interventions. The belief regarding the cost effectiveness (about a third as good as we thought) is itself supported by evidence, so if you think the best options are 10× as good as the average ones, you would still expect this one to be “above average”. Not sure about 90th percentile but I do think there’s a fair amount of NGO work whose effectiveness is statist indistinguishable from zero, and a minority that’s arguable actively harmful.
Did you produce this podcast? Can you share a link?
“Monitoring and Evaluation”, as I understand it.
Is it possible that subgroups within EA have sexual harrassment rates that are significantly above or below baseline? For example, maybe AI related spaces or SF Bay Area spaces have higher levels of sexual harrassment. Then people who are generally in those spaces would subjectively observe that the level of sexual harrassment is high, even though it might not be if you were to average across all of EA.
If there are parts of EA that have lower than average levels of sexual harrassment, I would not expect anyone to speak up and say, “man, this animal welfare community sure doesn’t have much sexual harrassment”. So there is a bias in terms of who is moved to share their experience.
At the risk of being too curmudgeonly, I’d say the main take is to stay away from the news cycle.
I would argue that MacKenzie Scott’s giving is pretty close to direct indexing and … pretty not great. Though it does have the one advantage that apparently nobody will criticize you for taking this approach.
Maybe instead of indexing one should do something like, spend 5 minutes upfront to decide what your default option will be, be it GiveDirectly, GiveWell, or something else (even unicef!). And then send whatever you haven’t granted there.
My understanding is that there is an extensive body of evidence that people become more rational and put in more cognitive effort when there are real-money stakes involved; but I would welcome commentary from someone more familiar with the literature.
Among EAs, it has become de facto or even obligatory to “buy” Longtermism.
I don’t really agree with this, there are plenty of shorttermist EAs and the majority of EA funding goes to shorttermist causes.
Thanks for this thoughtful piece.
One thing that I worry about when communicating on LinkedIn about EA affiliations is do-gooder derogation. Currently I am in a position where I don’t have to worry about that as much, but I can easily imagine that employers might feel they can make a lowball offer to someone who is “just going to give it to charity anyway” (versus spend it on private school or whatever). For this reason I set my EA group affiliations on LinkedIn to private.
Malaria nets only last 3 years anyway, their direct impact does not require the world to last longer than that (although, perhaps you value saving a life less, if you think the world will soon end).
According to justdone.com, this post is 89% AI content, and it certainly reads that way to me.
Thanks Nick for your thoughts. I’ve read Poor Economics but I’m not sure that the arguments there apply to this situation.
I definitely agree that the poor struggle with purchases that require capital investment, such as buying in bulk. My sense is that partly that is because capital is just vary scarce, and partly that is because of pressure to share any accumulated capital. But the menstrual cups aren’t very expensive and would be a one-time purchase, so I’m not sure that argument applies here; although I suppose that in a sense the cup is the bulk version of disposable products.
I am less familiar with the phenomenon of selling crops out of season. Could this be a social pressure thing where everyone feels compelled to invest in the village saving group?
And, I definitely agree that preventative measures are a tough sell to the poor, pretty much across the board. That is why we fund free bednet distribution, by the way! In fact in general diffusion of preventative innovations is quite slow, which is one reason why they are often subsidized or compelled by governments. Insofar as the menstrual cups constitute a preventative, I absolutely agree we should not expect the poor to buy them. But, your analysis suggests the main benefit is financial, and with a pretty quick return on investment, so this situation seems different from that.
Would be interested in seeing a version of this that looks at WELLBYs or otherwise uses moral weights to holistically judge all of the portfolio’s effects. But, this piece does seem like a convincing example of the idea the best charities are 100–1000× more effective than the average charity.