Our goal with hosting quarterly open threads is to give blog readers an opportunity to publicly raise comments or questions about GiveWell or related topics (in the comments section below). As always, you’re also welcome to email us at info@givewell.org or to request a call with GiveWell staff if you have feedback or questions you’d prefer to discuss privately. We’ll try to respond promptly to questions or comments.
You can view our December 2018 open thread here.
Comments
GiveWell accepts direct donations to help fund its operating expenses. With more funding, I would expect GiveWell might be able to identify charities even more effective than current top charities, or be able to direct more donations to current top charities. Would GiveWell consider writing a blog post comparing the expected value of a donation to GiveWell directly and a donation to a GiveWell top charity? Funding for GiveWell must be higher in expectation in some scenario, for if that were not true in any case, then it means GiveWell would have been better off not existing at all, which I understand not to be the case.
Hi Morgan,
Thanks for your question. We understand why you would want this, but unfortunately, we don’t plan to do this.
Coming up with a cost-effectiveness estimate for GiveWell’s operations funding would require making a number of extremely speculative, subjective judgment calls—substantially more than we make when we estimate the cost-effectiveness of our current top charities, or even when we explore new research areas and assess Incubation Grants. We wouldn’t expect people to put a lot of trust in this sort of estimate of our cost-effectiveness, nor would we think it to be highly accurate. Since this estimate would be low-quality, we wouldn’t want rely on it to convince people to give to GiveWell’s operations.
We do plan to significantly increase our spending over the next few years as we expand the scope of our research and our outreach, and will be looking for continued growth in our operating support to do so. We plan to continue sharing information about our progress and plans, which we hope is informative for donors who are considering supporting our operations.
Which of your recommended charities work directly in areas affected by Cyclone Idai?
Hi Brent, thank you for the question.
None of our recommended charities work specifically on providing relief from Cyclone Idai. Due to the time-sensitive nature of requests for disaster relief recommendations (GiveWell top charity reviews generally take hundreds or thousands of hours over the course of a year to complete), and our impression that funding isn’t always the bottleneck to more relief—either because of logistical challenges on the ground or because the media coverage of a disaster leads to a large number of donations—we would guess that, in general, our top charities represent more cost-effective opportunities for additional marginal donations.
We’ve written about some of these issues in our quick reviews of relief for the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, and the 2011 famine in Somalia. We have also written some general tips for disaster relief giving in the past, which are available here.
If you’re interested in which of our top charities work in countries affected by Cyclone Idai (Mozambique, Malawi, Zimbabwe, and Madagascar), note that the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative works in Mozambique, Malawi, and Madagascar; Helen Keller International provides vitamin A supplementation in Mozambique; the Against Malaria Foundation works in Malawi; and the END Fund‘s deworming program works in Zimbabwe.
– Isabel (GiveWell Research Analyst)
Curious if anyone can give more context about the recent board changes, especially around how the decision-making process was structured:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LhRGBERBQ79gbToDz/why-did-three-givewell-board-members-resign-in-april-2019
Does GiveWell have a research plan for addressing the modeling issues raised in this post? (Optimizer’s Curse & Wrong-Way Reductions)
https://confusopoly.com/2019/04/03/the-optimizers-curse-wrong-way-reductions/
Summary of the issues here:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Wghi6hpu5gGBZHvtj/link-the-optimizer-s-curse-and-wrong-way-reductions#HG4eWchkBTenXKGsr
Hi , I request that your service reach Uganda’s rural areas because really people are down there suffering and would get helped with your humanitarian services offered and i also request to coordinate the programme . Thank you and remain blessed
Hi Milan,
We’ve considered this issue and discussed it internally; we spent some time last year exploring ways in which we might potentially adjust our models for it, but did not come up with any promising solutions (and, as the post notes, an explicit quantitative adjustment factor is not Chris’s recommended solution at this time).
So, we are left in a difficult spot: the optimizer’s curse (and related issues) seems like a real threat, but we do not see high-return ways to address it other than continuing to broadly deepen and question our research. In the case that Chris highlights most — our recommendation of deworming — we have put substantial effort into working along the lines that he recommends and we continue to do so. Examples of the kind of additional scrutiny that we have given to this recommendation includes:
– Embracing model skepticism: We put weight on qualitative factors relevant to specific charities’ operations and specific uses of marginal funding (more). We generally try not to put too much weight on minor differences in cost-effectiveness analyses (more). We place substantial weight on cost-effectiveness analyses while doing what we can to recognize their limitations and bring in other forms of evidence.
– Re-examining our assumptions through vetting: we asked Senior Advisor David Roodman to independently assess the evidence for deworming and he produced extensive reports with his thoughts: see here and here.
– Having conversations and engaging with a variety of deworming researchers, particularly including skeptics. E.g., we’ve engaged with work from skeptical Cochrane researchers (e.g. here and here), epidemiologist Nathan Lo, Melissa Parker and Tim Allen (who looked at deworming through an anthropological perspective), etc.
– Funding additional research with the goal of potentially falsifying our conclusions: see e.g. grants here and here.
We will continue to take high-return steps to assess whether our recommendations are justified. For example, this year we are deepening our assessment of how we should expect deworming’s effectiveness to vary in contexts with different levels of worm infection. It is also on our list to consider quantitative adjustments for the optimizer’s curse further at some point in the future, but given the challenges we encountered in our work so far, we are unlikely to prioritize it soon.
Finally, we hope to continue to follow discussions on the optimizer’s curse and would be interested if theoretical progress or other practical suggestions are made. As Chris notes, this seems to be a cross-cutting theoretical issue that applies to cause prioritization researchers outside of GiveWell, as well.
Hey Josh,
Thanks for the care & attention you put into your reply.
I think the vetting work a la Roodman & deworming is a great idea for addressing some of the thorniness of the issue.
Glad to hear that you’re following discussions of the issue – totally agree that it arises for other cause prioritizers too.