Program Associate on Open Philâs Global Catastrophic Risks Capacity Building team.
đ¸ GWWC Pledger
Michael Townsendđ¸
Hi Vasco, thanks for your questions!
Iâll answer what I see as the core of your questions before providing some quick responses to each individually.
As you suggest, our approach is very similar to Open Philanthropyâs worldview diversification. One way of looking at it is, we want to provide donation recommendations that maximise cost-effectiveness from the perspective of a particular worldview. We think it makes sense to add another constraint to this, which is that we prioritise providing advice to more plausible worldviews that are consistent with our approach (i.e., focusing on outcomes, having a degree of impartiality, and wanting to rely on evidence and reason).
Iâll share how this works with an example. The âglobal health and wellbeingâ cause area contains recommendations that appeal to people with (some combination) of the following beliefs:
We should prioritise helping people over animals
Some scepticism about highly theoretical theories of change, and a preference for donating to charities whose impact is supported by evidence
Itâs very valuable to save a life
Itâs very valuable to improve someoneâs incomes
People may donate to the cause area without all of these beliefs, or with some combination, or perhaps with none of them but with another motivation not included. Perhaps they have more granular beliefs on top of these, which means they might only be interested in a subset of the fund (e.g., focusing on charities that improve lives rather than save them).
Many of your questions seem to be suggesting that, when we account for consumption of animal products, (3) and (4) are not so plausible. I suspect that this is among the strongest critiques for worldviews that would support GHW. I have my own views about it (as would my colleagues), but from a âGWWCâ perspective, we donât feel confident enough in this argument to use it as a basis to not support this kind of work. In other words, we think the worldviews that would want to give to GHW are sufficiently plausible.
I acknowledge thereâs a question-begging element to this response: I take it your point is why is it sufficiently plausible, and who decides this? Unfortunately, we can acknowledge that we donât have a strong justification here. Itâs a subjective judgement formed by the research team, informed by existing cause prioritisation work from other organisations. We donât feel well-placed to do this work directly (for much the same reason as we need to evaluate evaluators rather than doing charity evaluation ourselves). We would be open to investigating these questions further by speaking with organisations engaging in this cause-prioritisation â weâd love to have a more thoughtful and justified approach to cause prioritisation. In other words, I think youâre pushing on the right place (and hence this answer isnât particularly satisfying).
More generally, weâre all too aware that there are only two of us working directly to decide our recommendation and are reluctant to use our own personal worldviews in highly contested areas to determine our recommendations. Of course, it has to happen to some degree (and we aim to be transparent about it). For example, if I were to donate today, I would likely give 100% of my donations to our Risks and Resilience Fund. I have my reasons, and think Iâm making the right decision according to my own views, but Iâm aware others would disagree with me, and in my role I need to make decisions about our recommendations through the lens of commonly held worldviews I disagree with.
Iâll now go through your questions individually:
If someone wanting to donate 1 M$ who was not pre-commited to any particular area asked for your advise on which of your recommended funds is more cost-effective, and wanted to completely defer to you without engaging in the decision process, what would you say?
Weâd likely suggest donating to our cause area funds, via the âall cause bundleâ, splitting their allocations equally between the three areas. This is our default âset-and-forgetâ option, that seems compelling from a perspective of wanting to give a fraction of oneâs giving to causes that are maximally effective from particular worldviews. This is not the optimal allocation of moral uncertainty (on this approach, the different worldviews could âtradeâ and increase their combined impact); we havenât prioritised trying to find such an optimised portfolio for this purpose. Itâd be an interesting project, and would encourage anyone to do this and share it on the Forum and with us!
Are you confident that donating to the Animal Welfare Fund (AWF) is less than 10 times as cost-effective as donating to GiveWellâs Top Charities Fund (TCF)? If not, have you considered investigating this?
We are not confident. This is going to depend on how you value animals compared to humans; weâre also not sure exactly how cost-effective the AWF Fund is (just that it is the best option we know of in a cause area we think is generally important, tractable and neglected).
If you thought donating to the AWF was over 10 times as cost-effective as donating to TCF (you may actually agree/âdisagree with this), would you still recommend the latter (relatedly)? If so, would you disclaim that your best guess was that AWF was significantly more cost-effective than TCF?
If we thought there wasnât a sufficiently plausible worldview whereby TCF was the best option we knew of, we would not recommend it.
Are you confident that donating to TCF is beneficial accounting for effects on animals? If not, have you considered investigating this? I did not find âanimalâ nor âmeatâ in your evaluation of GiveWell.
We did not consider this, and so do not have a considered answer. I think this would be something we would be interested in considering in our next investigation.
If you thought donating to TCF resulted in a net decrease in welfare due to the meat-eater problem (you may actually agree/âdisagree with this), would you still recommend it? If so, would you disclaim that your best guess was that TCF resulted in a net decrease in welfare, but that you recommended it for other reasons?
As above, we would if we didnât think there was a sufficiently strong worldview by which TCF was the best option we knew of. This could be because of a combination of the meat eater problem, and that we think itâs just not plausible to discount animals. Itâs an interesting question, but itâs also one where Iâm not sure our comparative advantage is coming to a view on it (though perhaps, just as we did with the view that GW should focus on economic progress, we could still discuss it in our evaluation).
Speaking personally, I have also perceived a move away from longtermism, and as someone who finds longtermism very compelling, this has been disappointing to see. I agree it has substantive implications on what we prioritise.
Speaking more on behalf of GWWC, where I am a researcher: our motivation for changing our cause area from âcreating a better futureâ to âreducing global catastrophic risksâ really was not based on PR. As shared here:
We think of a âhigh-impact cause areaâ as a collection of causes that, for donors with a variety of values and starting assumptions (âworldviewsâ), provide the most promising philanthropic funding opportunities. Donors with different worldviews might choose to support the same cause area for different reasons. For example, some may donate to global catastrophic risk reduction because they believe this is the best way to reduce the risk of human extinction and thereby safeguard future generations, while others may do so because they believe the risk of catastrophes in the next few decades is sufficiently large and tractable that it is the best way to help people alive today.
Essentially, weâre aiming to use the term âreducing global catastrophic risksâ as a kind of superset that includes reducing existential risk, and that is inclusive of all the potential motivations. For example, when looking for recommendations in this area, we would be happy to include recommendations that only make sense from a longtermist perspective. A large part of the motivation for this was based on finding some of the arguments made in several of the posts you linked (including âEA and Longtermism: not a crux for saving the worldâ) compelling.
Also, our decision to step down from managing the communications for the Longtermism Fund (now âEmerging Challenges Fundâ) was based on wanting to be able to more independently evaluate Longviewâs grantmaking, rather than brand association.
ďGWWCâs new recomÂmenÂdaÂtions and cause area funds
AMA: GWWC reÂsearch team
GWWCâs evalÂuÂaÂtions of evaluators
I disagree-voted because I feel like Iâve done much more than 100-hours of reading on AI Policy (including finishing the AI Safety Fundamentals Governance course) and still have a strong sense thereâs a lot I donât know, and regularly come across new work that I find insightful. Very possibly Iâm prioritising reading the wrong things (and would really value a reading list!) but thought Iâd share my experience as a data point.
I think itâs a solid improvement! I only occasionally browsed the previous version, but I remember it being a bit tricky to find the headline figures I was interested after listening to them cited on podcasts, whereas now going to https://ââepochai.org/ââtrends they seem all quite easy to find (plus dig into the details of) due to the intuitive/ââelegant layout.
We did!
Our team put a lot of thought into the job description which highlights the essential and desirable skills we were looking for. Each test was written with these criteria in mind, and we also used them to help reviewers score responses.[1] This helped reviewers provide scores more consistently and purposefully. Just to avoid overstating things though, Iâd add that we werenât just trying to legalistically make sure every question had a neat correspondence to previously written criteria, but instead were thinking âis this representative of the type of work the role involves?â
- ^
This is probably a bit more in the weeds than necessary, but though the initial application questions were written with clear reference to essential/âdesirable skills in the job description, I didnât convert that into a clear grading rubric for reviewers to use. This was just an oversight.
- ^
We did correspond via email, but yes thatâs rightâwe didnât have a video call with any candidates until the work trial.
I think thereâs a case to have had a call before then, as suggested by one of the candidates that gave us feedback:
One helpful suggestion they offered us was running a Q&A session with each candidate just before the work trial. This could have been an opportunity to more casually meet with them, and discuss any concerns they might have about the work trial.
The reason itâs non-obvious to me whether that would have been worthwhile is that it would have lengthened the process (in our case, due to the timing of leave commitments, the delay would have been considerable).
Hiring retÂroÂspecÂtive: ReÂsearch ComÂmuÂniÂcaÂtor for GivÂing What We Can
LongterÂmism Fund: AuÂgust 2023 Grants Report
Yes, we are aiming to publish this next week, and it should include an explanation on the delay. (Also thanks for checking in on thisâthe accountability is helpful.)
I donât have any particularly strong views, and would be interested in what others think.
Broadly, I feel like I agree that more specificity/âtransparency is helpful, though I donât feel convinced that itâs not also worth asking at some stage in the application an open-ended question like âWhy are you interested in the role?â. Not sure I can explain/âdefend my intuitions here much right now but I would like to think more on it when I get around to writing some reflections on the Research Communicator hiring process.
Iâm not sure I follow what you mean by transparency in this context. Do you mean being more transparent about what exactly we were looking for? In our case we asked for <100 words on âWhy are you interested in this role?â and âBriefly, what is your experience with effective giving and/âor effective altruism?â and we were just interested in seeing if applicantsâ interest/âexperienced aligned with the skills, traits and experience we listed in the job descriptions.
In the hiring round I mentioned, we did time submissions for the work tests, and at least my impression is we found a way of doing so worked out fairly well. Having a timed component for the initial application is also possible, but might require more of an âhonour codeâ system as setting up a process that allows for verification of the time spent is a pretty a big investment for the first stage of an application.
As a former applicant for many EA org roles, I strongly agree! I recall spending on average 2-8 times longer on some initial applications than was estimated by many job ads.
As someone who just helped drive a hiring process for Giving What We Can (for a Research Communicator role) I feel a bit daft having experienced it on the other side, but not having learned from it. I/âwe did not do a good enough job here. We had a few initial questions that we estimated would take ~20-60 minutes, and in retrospect I now imagine many candidates would have spent much longer than this (I know I would have).
Over the coming month or so Iâm hoping to draft a post with reflections on what we learned from this, and how we would do better next time (inspired by Aaron Gertlerâs 2020 post on hiring a copyeditor for CEA). Iâll be sure to include this comment and its suggestion (having a link at the end of the application form where people can report how long it actually took to fill the form in) in that post.
Thanks for this post! I appreciate your writing, and also appreciated including images in your postâit made it more fun to read.
I wrote some feedback privately which the author thought would be good to share publicly, so this is a lightly edited version of that feedback:
The post was quite long, taking 10-15 minutes or so for me to read. I think this was because you wrote this in quite a careful way, including caveats, counterarguments, etc., and Iâm not sure all this was necessary.
I think a shorter (~1/â3rd the length) post which just explained what convenience meant using a few examples could have been better. In particular, it would be useful to emphasise examples where existing terminology fails but where âconvenienceâ succeeds.
On that last point: I canât immediately think of an example where âconvenienceâ would be helpful (except for times I would already use the word âconvenienceâ) and so I donât feel sold on the term. I also think we should have a very high bar for adding jargon. In the examples you gave, I think I generally either: prefer the original sentence you included, would already use the term convenient (if it came to mind), or think thereâs a better way of conveying the same meaning using a different term.
To combine the few comments above: I think itâs difficult to decide which jargon will be helpful from the armchair. So I think rather than a carefully made argument for the uptake of a particular term, I think itâs better to just define the term and put it out there (with a few examples) -- if itâs useful enough, people will use it; if not, it probably wonât catch on (and I donât think a careful argument would have made the difference).
I found the convenience accounting part quite confusing. Specifically, I donât get how the concept of convenience helps do this kind of accounting, and (as I think you seem to believe based on your âaccountant foolishly trying to list...â) I donât think this accounting is actually helpful for most decisions.
I really like the general concept of trying to keep track of what is and is not convenient to you, your organisations, others around you, etc. I appreciated you giving such honest examples of your own conveniences. Iâm not sure you needed the term to do this, but I do think itâs good practice.
Thanks for conducting this impact assessment, for sharing this draft with us before publishing it, and for your help with GWWCâs own impact evaluation! A few high-level comments (as a researcher at GWWC):
First, just reiterating that we appreciate others checking our assumptions and sharing their views on them.
As other commenters have discussed, we donât think it makes sense to only account for our influence on longtermist donations. Weâd like to do a better job explaining our views here, which we see as similar to Open Philanthropyâs worldview diversification.
I also appreciate your acknowledgements of the limitations of your approach (some of which are similar to ours) in that you have not modelled our potential indirect benefitsâwhich may well be the driver of our impact.
Regarding the difference between how you have modelled the value of the GWWC Pledge versus how we did so:
As a quick-summary for others: the key difference is that GWWCâs impact evaluation worked out the value of the pledge by looking at GWWC Pledgers as an overall cohort, and looking at the average amount donated by Pledgers each year, over their Pledge tenure. The analysis in this evaluation (explained in the post) looks at Pledgers as individuals and models them each in turn, and takes the average of those models. (Please correct me if Iâm wrong here!).
Consequently, this approach uses a âricherâ set of information, though I also see it as requiring more assumptions (that the rules for extrapolating each individual Pledgersâ giving are in fact correct). Whereas our approach uses less information, but only assumes thatâon averageâpast data will be indicative of future data. Iâd be interested in whether you think this is a fair summary.
I have some intuitions that GWWCâs approach is more robust, but that this oneâif done wellâcould potentially be more valid. Theyâre just intuitions though, and I havenât thought too deeply about it.
I find it interesting that this approach appears to lead to more optimistic conclusions abut GWWCâs impact (despite the way it âboundsâ how any individual Pledgersâ giving can be extrapolated over time).
Thanks again for your work!
Hi Michael, thank you for the response
No problem!
Regarding:Also, wouldnât the above âx-risk discount rateâ be 2% rather than 0.2%?
There was a typo in my answer before: (1 - ((1 â 1â6)^(1/â100)) = 0.0018) which is ~0.2% (not 0.2), and is a fair amount smaller than the discount rate we actually used (3.5%). Still, if you assigned a greater probability of existential risk this century than Ord does, you could end up with a (potentially much) higher discount rate. Alternatively, even with a high existential risk estimate, if you thought we were going to find more and more cost-effective giving opportunities as time goes on, then at least for the purpose of our impact evaluation, these effects could cancel out.
I think if we spent more time trying to come to an all-things-considered view on this topic, weâd still be left with considerable uncertainty, and so I think it was the right call for us to just acknowledge to take the pragmatic approach of deferring to the Green Book.
In terms of the general tension between potentially high x-risk and the chance of transformative AI, I can only speak personally (not on behalf of GWWC). Itâs something on my mind, but itâs unclear to me what exactly the tension is. I still think itâs great to move money to effective charities across a range of impactful causes, and Iâm excited about building a culture of giving significantly and effectively throughout oneâs life (i.e., via the Pledge). I donât think GWWC should pivot and become specifically focused on one cause (e.g., AI) and otherwise Iâm not sure exactly what the potential for transformative AI should imply for GWWC.
This is a really insightful question!
I think itâs fair to characterise our evaluations as looking for the âbestâ charity recommendations, rather than the best charity evaluators, or recommendations that reach a particular standard but that are not the best. Though weâre looking to recommend the best charities, we donât think this means that thereâs no value in looking into âgreat-charity evaluatorsâ as you called them. We donât have an all-or-nothing approach when looking into an evaluatorsâ work and recommendation and can choose to only include the recommendations from that evaluator that meet our potentially higher standard. This means, so long as itâs possible some of the recommendations of a âgreat-charity evaluatorâ are the best by a particular worldview, weâd see value in looking into them.
In one sense, this increases the bar for our evaluations, but in another it also means an evaluatorâs recommendations might be the best even if we werenât particularly impressed by the quality of the work. For example, suppose there was a cause area for which there was only one evaluator, the threshold for this evaluating being the best may well be: they are doing a sufficiently good job that there is a sufficiently plausible worldview by which donating via their recommendations is still their best option (i.e., compared to donating to the best evaluator in another area).
Itâs too early to commit to how we will approach future evaluations, however, we currently lean towards sticking with the core idea of focusing on helping donors âmaximiseâ expected cost-effectiveness, rather than âmaximisingâ the number of donors giving cost-effectively /â providing a variety of âgreat-but-not-bestâ options.
As above, we would see value in looking at charity evaluators who take an approach of recommending everything above a minimum standard, but we would only look to follow the recommendations we thought were the best (...by some sufficiently plausible worldview).
Iâd be interested in where you think we could improve our communications here. Part of the challenge weâve faced is that we want to be careful not to overstate our work. For example, âwe only provide recommendations from the best evaluators we know of and have looked intoâ, is accurate, but âwe only provide recommendations from the best evaluatorsâ is not (because there are evaluators we havenât looked into yet). Another challenge is to not overly qualify everything we say, to the point of being confusing and inaccessible to regular donors. Still, after scrolling through some of our content, I think we could find a way to thread this needle better as it is an important distinction to emphasise â we also donât want to understate our work!