GiveWell exists to help people do as much good as possible with their financial giving. We’re interested in the related question of how to do as much good as possible with one’s talents and career choice, and so we’ve been interested in the debate that has sprung up around last month’s article by Dylan Matthews… Read More
The GiveWell Blog
Month: June 2013
Near-term grantmaking
[Added August 27, 2014: GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.] As stated previously, we expect that it will take quite a long time for us to reach the point of issuing major recommendations based on our GiveWell Labs work. That said, there have been – and will be – situations in… Read More
The moral case for giving doesn’t rely on questionable quantitative estimates
In light of Peter Singer’s TED talk and Dylan Matthews’s piece on “earning to give,” there’s been a fair amount of discussion recently of what one might call “Peter Singer’s challenge,” which I’d roughly summarize as follows: By giving $X to the right charity, you can save a human life. This fact has multiple surprising… Read More
How to help GiveWell
We often get the question, “how can I most help GiveWell?” First and foremost, you can donate to our top charities. Giving to our top charities accomplishes good directly, but it also really helps GiveWell too (as long as we know about your gift). You may not have much to give, but by giving what… Read More
Meta-research update
As mentioned previously, we are currently conducting an in-depth investigation of meta-research, with the hopes of producing our first “medium-depth” report on the giving opportunities in a cause. Our investigation isn’t yet complete, but it has taken several turns that we’ve found educational, and our vision of what it means to investigate a “cause” has… Read More