Siobhan_M

• Siobhan_M 23 May 2026 6:32 UTC

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  in reply to: Justin Steele’s comment on: The leg­i­bil­ity trap: how “fund the most rigor­ous thinkers” can quietly se­lect for the wrong people

  This is a great point, I think it’s sort of a double-edged sword where this is the reason why the same elite legible orgs keep on getting funded, but if some orgs can do deeper work in local networks and share this extra information with others and this work compounds, it will have positive effects

• Siobhan_M 23 May 2026 4:40 UTC

  3 points

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  on: The leg­i­bil­ity trap: how “fund the most rigor­ous thinkers” can quietly se­lect for the wrong people

  I worked for a couple years as a global development grantmaker and completely agree with this: “”the people closest to a problem can allocate better than distant experts” is something your own best evidence supports in important cases. That makes proximity decision-relevant, not sentiment to be stripped out.”

  It’s bothered me for years that, as you note, a lot of effectiveness-oriented grantmaking is aimed at what’s legible to elites in high-income countries when those are usually not the most effective or cost-effective organizations (obviously some of them are! You mention GiveDirectly, and GiveWell’s top charities are both great organizations and elite founded/​legible). I always think of how many great organizations we are missing and how much we don’t even know we don’t know. Yes, it’s harder to find effective organizations that might be based in other countries and not within a grantmaker’s professional network, but that just means that grantmakers might need to spend more time to find them (which should increase overall expected value!) and should in many cases be from and/​or based in these places to make this easier.

  I will note I found the AI-assisted prose of this piece a bit distracting — thanks for flagging it as well — but I hope that doesn’t stop people from engaging with your very important ideas.

Jobs, net­works, and ed­u­ca­tion are use­ful for ev­ery­one: ex­pand­ing how EA thinks about im­pact in global health and development

[Linkpost] Why Dean Kar­lan, chief economist of USAID, re­signed on Tuesday

• Siobhan_M 28 Nov 2024 15:19 UTC

  3 points

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  in reply to: Ben Millwood🔸’s comment on: Open Wallets, Empty Hearts [linkpost]

  I had a similar question to yours about what the essay is trying to say about Givewell-style effective altruism. My interpretation, which could be wrong, was that the author is saying that Givewell-style EA is a good thing, but is not a moral obligation. I responded in a blog post (not aimed at EAs, but people who may share the same hesitancies as the author) “How do you know how to save a drowning child across the world?”.

  Following from this, I think criticisms of effective altruism often end up with a conclusion that is too far in the other direction: the conclusion that we only have moral obligation to people in our immediate circles and thus should focus on parochial charity, a conclusion that does not leave room for moral concern and yes, even obligation,² for the global rich to people living in poverty far from us.

  I don’t think any argument that focuses solely on helping within communities that we are already in — communities that are, even in the US alone, highly segregated by income; and are globally even more vastly unequal — adequately addresses the moral ill that is global poverty.

  I argue that people who might share the concerns of the author (as I understood them) about EA might want to take the option of donating to direct cash transfers or effective community-based organizations in low- and middle-income countries.

The im­pact of the coun­ter­fac­tual dol­lar: a defence of your lo­cal food pantry

• Siobhan_M 9 Dec 2022 7:27 UTC

  3 points

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  in reply to: technicalities’s comment on: Learn­ing from non-EAs who seek to do good

  Thanks for the comment—this and the other comments around cause neutrality have given me a lot to think about! My thoughts on cause neutrality (especially around where the pressure points are for me in theory vs. practice) are not fully formed; it’s something I’m planning to focus a lot on in the next few weeks, in which time I might have a better response.

• Siobhan_M 9 Dec 2022 7:21 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: Karthik Tadepalli’s comment on: Learn­ing from non-EAs who seek to do good

  Thanks for this thought! I’d considered putting something similar in the original post simply based on anecdotes, but not being a community builder or someone who joined in college I wasn’t sure enough to include it. I’d be interested to know your or others’ thoughts on what community-building in particular could do to catalyze more interaction between EA and other ways of doing good?

• Siobhan_M 9 Dec 2022 7:18 UTC

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  in reply to: Zoe Williams’s comment on: Learn­ing from non-EAs who seek to do good

  This is a great summary, thank you so much!

Learn­ing from non-EAs who seek to do good