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 In brief: 

 Read More   POSTED IN:  Permalink   Comments 0 Leave a Comment     New Staff in Operations, Programs, and Research   April 10, 2019 byMichael Levine   We have had a lot of new staff join Open Philanthropy over the last year. In this post, I’d like to introduce the new members of our team. We’re excited to have them!

 More new staff are joining soon, and I will be introducing them in coming months.

 Hannah Aldern, Operations Associate Hannah joined Open Phil in January 2019. Prior to joining the Open Philanthropy Project, she worked with Patagonia as an Environmental Grants Coordinator. Before that, she spent several years managing environmental education programs, guiding wilderness trips, and working on permaculture projects. Hannah has a B.S. in Environmental Science from the University of California, Los Angeles.

 Read More   POSTED IN:  Permalink   Comments 0 Leave a Comment      History of Philanthropy Literature Review: Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs   April 8, 2019 byHolden Karnofsky   We’re now supporting History of Philanthropy work via a grant to the Urban Institute. One output of this project is a literature review on the social impact of - and role of philanthropic funding in - the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs (sometimes abbreviated as “Pugwash”), which “brought together notable scientists from both sides of the iron curtain in order to discuss nuclear disarmament in an informal but serious atmosphere” starting in 1957. This case is particularly interesting from the perspective of global catastrophic risk reduction, as Pugwash and its founder won the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize “for their efforts to diminish the part played by nuclear arms in international politics and, in the longer run, to eliminate such arms.”

 I thought this literature review made a fairly strong case for two propositions which, taken together, establish Pugwash as a seeming case of strong philanthropic impact via global catastrophic risk reduction: 

 Read More   POSTED IN: History of Philanthropy  Permalink   Comments 0 Leave a Comment     Reflections on Our 2018 Generalist Research Analyst Recruiting   March 7, 2019 byLuke Muehlhauser   In February 2018, Open Philanthropy announced new openings for “generalist” Research Analyst (RA) roles, and we have since hired 5 applicants from that hiring round. This was one of our top priorities for 2018.

 In this post I summarize our process and some lessons learned. I am hoping that in addition to our general audience, this post might be useful to others looking to hire a similar talent profile, and to potential future generalist RA applicants to Open Philanthropy.

 Read More   POSTED IN:  Permalink   Comments 2 Leave a Comment     Supporting a New Technology Security Policy Think Tank   February 28, 2019 byLuke Muehlhauser   Today, Georgetown University announced our support for the launch of a new think tank dedicated to policy analysis at the intersection of national and international security and emerging technologies. The Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) is led by Jason Matheny, former Assistant Director of National Intelligence and Director of Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), the U.S. intelligence community’s research organization.

 Read our full grant page here.

 Read More   POSTED IN:  Permalink   Comments 0 Leave a Comment     Suggestions for Individual Donors from Open Philanthropy Project Staff - 2018   December 20, 2018 byHolden Karnofsky   Last year, the year before, and the year before that, we published a set of suggestions for individual donors looking for organizations to support. This year, we are repeating the practice and publishing updated suggestions from Open Philanthropy Project staff who chose to provide them.

 The same caveats as in previous years apply: 

These are reasonably strong options in causes of interest, and shouldn’t be taken as outright recommendations (i.e., it isn’t necessarily the case that the person making the suggestion thinks they’re the best option available across all causes).  In many cases, we find a funding gap we’d like to fill, and then we recommend filling the entire funding gap with a single grant. That doesn’t leave much scope for making a suggestion for individuals. The cases listed below, then, are the cases where, for one reason or another, we haven’t decided to recommend filling an organization’s full funding gap, and we believe it could make use of fairly arbitrary amounts of donations from individuals. Our explanations for why these are strong giving opportunities are very brief and informal, and we don’t expect individuals to be persuaded by them unless they put a lot of weight on the judgment of the person making the suggestion. Read More   POSTED IN:  Permalink   Comments 0 Leave a Comment     New web app for calibration training   December 14, 2018 byLuke Muehlhauser   In October 2016, we wrote:

 we are contracting [a developer] to build a simple online application for credence calibration training: training the user to accurately determine how confident they should be in an opinion, and to express this confidence in a consistent and quantified way.

 That online application is now available:

 

Play “Calibrate Your Judgment” Note that you must sign in with a GuidedTrack, Facebook, or Google account, so that the application can track your performance over time.

 We expect many users will find this program to be the most useful free online calibration training currently available.

 That said, we think there are several ways in which a calibration app could be more engaging and useful than ours, if someone were to invest substantially more development effort than we did. Some reflections on the challenges we encountered, and some lessons we learned, are available in this Google doc.

 Spencer Greenberg, the lead developer of Calibrate Your Judgment, has released a paper describing the scoring rules used in the app, here.

 Update April 23: In response to feedback, we have now improved the set of questions used for the app’s confidence intervals module, by removing hundreds of ill-formed or confusingly worded questions. We hope this leads to a better and more useful experience for users.

 Read More   POSTED IN:  Permalink   Comments 15 Leave a Comment     2018 Allocation to GiveWell Top Charities   December 12, 2018 byHolden Karnofsky   We believe that every life has equal value — and that philanthropic dollars can go particularly far by helping those who are living in poverty by global standards. Currently, the best giving opportunities we’ve found in the Global Health and Development focus area are recommended by GiveWell. (Read more about our relationship to GiveWell here.)

 Throughout the course of this year, we have recommended GiveWell Incubation Grants to support the development of potential future top charities, as well as general support funding for GiveWell’s operations (capped at 20% of operating expenses for reasons described here). GiveWell recently announced its updated list of top charities that focus on programs with a strong track record and excellent cost-effectiveness, can use additional funding to expand their core programs, and are exceptionally transparent. As we have in the past, we coordinated with GiveWell on how to recommend grants from Good Ventures — both in terms of the total amount donated and in terms of the distribution between recipient charities. GiveWell recommended, and we plan to approve, an allocation of $64 million for top charities in 2018.

 Read More   POSTED IN:  Permalink   Comments 0 Leave a Comment     October 2018 Open Thread   October 15, 2018 byMichael Levine   This post aims to give blog readers and followers of the Open Philanthropy Project an opportunity to publicly raise comments or questions about the Open Philanthropy Project or related topics (in the comments section below). As always, you’re also welcome to email us at info@openphilanthropy.org if there’s feedback or questions you’d prefer to discuss privately. We’ll try to respond promptly to questions or comments.

 You can see our most recent previous open thread here.

 Read More   POSTED IN: Open Threads  Permalink   Comments 13 Leave a Comment     History of Philanthropy Case Study: The Campaign for Marriage Equality   September 20, 2018 byHolden Karnofsky   The campaign for marriage equality in the U.S. over the past couple decades is a remarkable success story. To better understand philanthropy’s role in it, we commissioned Benjamin Soskis, whose work we’ve funded via our history of philanthropy project, to produce a literature review and case study (.pdf). It covers the history of the campaign to secure marriage equality in the United States, which culminated in the Supreme Court’s decision, in Obergefell v. Hodges, that the U.S. Constitution guarantees same-sex couples the right to marry.

 Here are a few of our takeaways from the report:

 Philanthropic efforts likely played a role in the campaign for marriage equality, but there were also broad cultural trends toward more people being “out” as homosexual, and more people knowing someone who was out, and this likely shifted public opinion substantially. Thus, it’s not clear that this campaign’s “philanthropy playbook” would be effective if applied to other causes that do not benefit from analogous cultural trends. There is mixed evidence with respect to whether philanthropic “insiders” had correct strategic views: Some strategic decisions made by “outsiders” looked at the time (to insiders) to be reckless and counterproductive. Some of those look like good decisions in retrospect, while others ended up looking counterproductive in the short run, but may (or may not) have been productive in the long run. Some decisions that look good in retrospect may only appear so due to the (potentially) inevitable long-run success of the campaign. Some of the data-driven messaging analysis pushed by the “insiders” looks quite successful in retrospect. Despite the fact that the ultimate victories were in the Supreme Court, there were some philanthropic contributions that seem highly relevant, particularly funding messaging analysis and ballot initiatives. There are good arguments that legislative and ballot victories played an important role in later Supreme Court decisions, including Obergefell v. Hodges. 

Read the full literature review and case study here (.pdf) Read More   POSTED IN: History of Philanthropy  Permalink   Comments 0 Leave a Comment    Pages1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 … next › »           Stay Updated   Email me new blog posts Blog RSS feed More information     Recent blog posts        Our Progress in 2018 and Plans for 2019    New Staff in Operations, Programs, and Research    History of Philanthropy Literature Review: Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs    Reflections on Our 2018 Generalist Research Analyst Recruiting    Supporting a New Technology Security Policy Think Tank        Archives    2019 April 2019    April 2019    April 2019    April 2019   March 2019    March 2019   February 2019    February 2019  2018 December 2018    December 2018    December 2018    December 2018   October 2018    October 2018   September 2018    September 2018   May 2018    May 2018   April 2018    April 2018   March 2018    March 2018    March 2018    March 2018   February 2018    February 2018    February 2018   January 2018    January 2018    January 2018    January 2018  2017 December 2017    December 2017    December 2017    December 2017   November 2017    November 2017   October 2017    October 2017   September 2017    September 2017    September 2017    September 2017    September 2017    September 2017   June 2017    June 2017    June 2017    June 2017    June 2017   April 2017    April 2017    April 2017   March 2017    March 2017    March 2017    March 2017   February 2017    February 2017    February 2017  2016 December 2016    December 2016    December 2016    December 2016   October 2016    October 2016   September 2016    September 2016    September 2016    September 2016    September 2016   July 2016    July 2016   June 2016    June 2016    June 2016   May 2016    May 2016    May 2016    May 2016   April 2016    April 2016    April 2016   March 2016    March 2016    March 2016   February 2016    February 2016    February 2016    February 2016    February 2016  2015 December 2015    December 2015   November 2015    November 2015   October 2015    October 2015   September 2015    September 2015    September 2015    September 2015    September 2015    September 2015   August 2015    August 2015    August 2015    August 2015   July 2015    July 2015    July 2015    July 2015    July 2015    July 2015   June 2015    June 2015    June 2015    June 2015   May 2015    May 2015    May 2015     May 2015   April 2015    April 2015    April 2015    April 2015    April 2015    April 2015   March 2015    March 2015    March 2015    March 2015    March 2015   February 2015    February 2015    February 2015    February 2015  2014 October 2014    October 2014    October 2014   September 2014    September 2014    September 2014   August 2014    August 2014   July 2014    July 2014    July 2014   June 2014    June 2014   May 2014    May 2014    May 2014    May 2014    May 2014   April 2014    April 2014    April 2014   March 2014    March 2014    March 2014   January 2014    January 2014    January 2014  2013 December 2013    December 2013   November 2013    November 2013    November 2013   October 2013    October 2013    October 2013    October 2013    October 2013   September 2013    September 2013   July 2013    July 2013    July 2013    July 2013   June 2013    June 2013    June 2013   May 2013    May 2013    May 2013   April 2013    April 2013    April 2013    April 2013   March 2013    March 2013   February 2013    February 2013  2012 September 2012    September 2012    September 2012   July 2012    July 2012   June 2012    June 2012    June 2012    June 2012   May 2012    May 2012    May 2012    May 2012   March 2012    March 2012   February 2012    February 2012    February 2012    February 2012   January 2012    January 2012  2011 October 2011    October 2011   September 2011    September 2011    September 2011    September 2011                contact us jobs press kit  facebook twitter rss © Open Philanthropy Project. Except as otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License. Some images may be copyrighted by others and not licensed for re-use: see image captions or footnotes. Privacy policy         try { clicky.init(100914494); }catch(e){}