I think the key story here is that Open Phil has ramped up donations from $30m to over $120m (4-fold growth in a year), and is expected to increase that several times more in the next few years, but this would be easy to miss in the presentation above.
That’s not EA as a movement though.
What’s the explanatory gap argument?
When is EA Global, particularly in the UK?
Do you have any of your research to date on this written up in a form that you can share and people can comment on?
This is an interesting discussion, people listing high earning careers which’re comparatively easy to get: https://www.facebook.com/groups/effective.altruists/permalink/1002743319782025/
Me also.
I haven’t had an easy way of linking to that opinion before; now I do. So as an 80k donor I’m glad they also see the value of distancing themselves from the ‘it’s all good as long as you donate’ position.
To be clear, you think it’s worth spending a few hundred quid apiece for linkable resources like this? (I.e. you’d pay others a similar amount in an impact purchase if they did so.)
you run the risk of discounting the impact of any project in which multiple actors were involved unless you have a precise break down of the causal power of each. That would essentially mean that it never looked worthwhile to engage with governments
If you look at what I said, you’ll see it doesn’t imply that—it’s simply saying we should do our best job at estimating the impact of GPP, with a spelt out justification of this, and that without this the reallocation of the £2.5bn shouldn’t be relied upon as a tangible result.
Yes this is absolutely not a thing that just GPP did—which is why I tried to call out in this post that several other groups were important to recommending it!
I have to admit I skimmed over that as I was reading it. It does make it especially unegregious, and I tried to be clear that I didn’t think you were doing anything wrong! I believe it was easy to skim over because it wasn’t flagged as a qualification to the claim that this was a tangible result, but as I said I understand you can’t really make qualifications explicit when needing to raise money.
(And also something I emphasised in the facebook post you link to.)
That’s entirely true.
Here are the relevant comments from one of the posts:
“The development of ODA five year strategies at Dfid and elsewhere are the result of an enormous number of factors and the interventions of hundreds of experts and even more interventions by NGOs in developing countries. I could name 50 or more groups in regular relationship with Dfid who, along with folks from the GPP could and will be taking a share of the credit.”
“Yes, it’s great that GPP got to have some input, but I agree with Frances to remember all the vast number of others having input.”
“5% credit for any single small organization involved in ODA advocacy would be incredibly high, the main inputs most listened to in ODA come from major players like the World Bank, WHO, Gates Foundation, IMF, individual other ODAs, certain independent and university based researchers ( say Chris Murray,in his own way Hans Rosling, certainly Angus Deaton; Dfid staff talk to tons of people at various levels) to a lesser degree groups like the African Union; when you then move to NGOs, the input of World Vision, Save the Children, CARE, Caritas, etc are strong. I think it is great that GWWC, CEA have worked hard on this effort and join in congratulating them. In fact, the release from GWWC, et al and Seb’s comments here are right on in appropriate modesty about their impact. Groups that promote the importance about having evidence of impact are especially subject to criticism if they overstate “hype” achievements. So, checking the desire to trake more credit than due is wise. The important news is what Difd is setting in place and howmuch goos it can do. Kudoes to Dfid which has played a leading role in the ODA community in pushing and researching measuring effectiveness. Hope this is not seen as poring cold water on an important collaborative effort by EA.”
This is not especially egregious in a fundraising post, and I understand that in these you have to adopt the persona of a marketer and can’t add too many qualifications and doubts. So I don’t think it’s necessarily bad that you said this. But, as an intellectual matter, I don’t think it’s quite fair to count “[DFID] reallocating £2.5bn to fund research into treating and responding to the diseases that cause the most suffering rather than direct work” as one of your “tangible results so far”. This was discussed plenty on the Facebook group, and as several people pointed out there was no clear evidence that you rather than the very many other groups that commented on DFID’s proposals were responsible for this particular spending decision.
No, it sounds as if https://github.com/getguesstimate/guesstimate-app (specifically the README.md shown at the bottom of it) will be the place you keep updated featuring information about the project and links to this. Thank you.
Thanks for putting the work in to generate these hard numbers, that kind of work is always helpful.
Do you have a ‘meta’ website describing the project more? E.g. the techs used and so on.
I see you deleted this. You could edit it and return it to a draft to unpublish.
William MacAskill and his ex-wife recently published a high profile article on wild animal suffering, using Cecil the Lion as a hook to argue that (given he was a predator) his death may have been a good thing, and that we should perhaps kill all lions: http://qz.com/497675/to-truly-end-animal-suffering-the-most-ethical-choice-is-to-kill-all-predators-especially-cecil-the-lion/
What did people think of this? I fear it may have done more harm than good, and I don’t understand the choice to publish something so controversial now, with a book to promote and a chance to get EA more into the mainstream.
spending a few bucks on recreation is not likely to move the needle in terms of your overall impact
Why is that? Do you mean that someone spending $500 less on entertainment over the year and donating it instead will result in less rather than more money going to help people, due to damage to sustainability and marketability?
Size, in terms of staff, would be one measure. Another is their budget: GiveWell’s revenue and expenses were in the area of $2–3 million in 2014; Animal Charity Evaluators’ is about one order of magnitude lower.
Those are both surely factors to take into account in evaluating how neglected something is, but other factors include how important and tractable the work (or the marginal work is). All of this lets you calculate out the value of marginal dollars.
The Fundraising Prospectus 2015 (page 16–17) talks about fundraising £150,000 for the rest of 2015 and 2016 with a stretch goal to add another six months.
Page 17 gives £223,765 as the budget for 2015, which is very roughly $350,000 (depending on how the UK Pound’s swung).
I think they argue somewhere that it’s the result of their ongoing work to a substantial degree and not just very early seed funding or activities
I didn’t find this convincing but I don’t want to press that point: the more basic point is that $350,000 isn’t necessary to cover the most basic operating costs, and some substantial portion of it does indeed go to fund additional marginal activities.
So either they really only fundraised for operating expenses or what they fundraised beyond that isn’t covered by their cost-effectiveness calculation.
You’re exactly right; I’m simply saying it’s the latter. It’s not clear that we disagree!
What ACE is doing reminds me a lot of what Open Phil is doing in terms of how hard it is for them to quantify the impact of the charities. This doesn’t seem to be so much in the nature of the cause areas – as with prioritizing research or existential risk – but rather the result of the neglect of the area, so that ACE has only little and poor-quality prior research to draw on.
This seems correct.
Evidence Action and SCI are top contenders, but I think the evidentiary basis for the effectiveness of deworming, while sizable, is more ambiguous than that for bednets, and more extreme estimates are also more likely to be wrong.
True.
GiveWell seems relatively less neglected than ACE.
I’m not sure this is correct, unless our metric is just size?
Some metacharities have estimated some leverage ratios, but they were always (as far as I’ve seen) the average ones of their past donations not of marginal donations, which may bias the estimate upward.
True.
(Except when the metacharity was just fundraising for operating expenses like Giving What We Can.)
This isn’t true—it hardly takes ~$350,000 a year to cover the most basic operating costs rather than marginal activities, especially when you already have ~$320,000 in the bank and your parent organisation has got almost a million in its coffers. One indication of this is that a very large share of Giving What We Can’s past donations come from the initial (volunteer-led, unfunded) creation of a website where the case for giving more and giving better was made and people could report their pledges. But few of their salaries go to basic maintenance of this, as opposed to charity evaluation and philosophy research, conferences, etc.
I don’t know whether it would be speciesist to value a human QALY one or two orders of magnitude higher than a nonhuman “QALY”
It seems that it would.
A late thank you!