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 previous open threads here.
Comments
Any thoughts on Ukraine related giving opportunities?
Hi, Martin,
Thank you for raising this topic. The staff at GiveWell share many of our followers’ shock and sadness at the crisis unfolding in Ukraine, as well as the desire to help. GiveWell’s focus remains, as ever, on finding the most cost-effective ways to save and improve lives on a daily, ongoing, longer-term basis; we generally don’t investigate giving opportunities related to humanitarian crises, such as those caused by war and natural disasters, so we unfortunately don’t have specific recommendations for giving to help relief efforts in Ukraine.
That said, we have written about giving during a crisis in the past. That blog post isn’t strictly relevant to the situation in Ukraine, but you may find some of the content helpful as you vet options for support (or for further clarification of our views on giving to disaster relief in general).
About five years ago, one of your senior advisors did a deep dive into the research around deworming [1] [2] and concluded the main research study relied on made him lack confidence “in the generalizability of that finding [of long term effects] to other settings.” Per [3], GiveWell concluded there is “weaker evidence on the causal relationship between reducing worm loads and improved life outcomes”. Nevertheless, GiveWell funds these programs because it still thinks “the possibility that deworming children has a subtle, lasting impact on [children’s] development” [4]. GiveWell admits this is a distant possibility, as it discounts the estimated long-term effects by 87% due to concerns about generalizability [5].
This is a big lack of confidence.
Can/will GiveWell return to evaluate these programs more thoroughly?
– You’ve expanded (hired more analysts).
– You likely have five years of additional information since the last update, either through academic research or data collected by NGOs.
P.S. Even if you can’t get more confidence that a certain long-term effect is real versus not real, at least you could get a better estimate of the “replicability adjustment” factor. This 2019 doc provides some ideas and mentions “a deworming replicability adjustment in the range of 5-30% (i.e., 70-95% discount) seems appropriate. Where one falls in that range requires a number of judgment calls.” So even if you can’t use newer data/studies put a better estimate of effect size and replicability and thus not need a replicability adjustment, at least you can shrink the uncertainty around that adjustment. Per GiveWell’s work, the adjustment factor can easily be off by a factor of 2.5 (current 13% adjustment version reasonable range of 5%-30%). That obviously has a lot of impact on how cost effective deworming programs look.
[1] https://blog.givewell.org/2016/12/06/why-i-mostly-believe-in-worms/
[2] https://blog.givewell.org/2017/01/04/how-thin-the-reed-generalizing-from-worms-at-work/
[3] https://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/deworming
[4] https://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/deworming#Developmentalimpacts
[5] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1B1fODKVbnGP4fejsZCVNvBm5zvI1jC7DhkaJpFk6zfo/edit#gid=472531943&range=A11
[6] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-F5sZBq6FD6E73SWkKFhwMR9gCdKUCTfp9dOe0I-1vw/edit
Hi, Mark,
Thanks for your comment. First, I want to note that you submitted a similar comment on the December 2021 open thread post, which we didn’t approve until just a few days ago. That was an oversight on our part, and we’re sorry this response is coming belatedly!
We don’t believe that there is significant additional valuable information to be gained from continuing to explore the existing literature on the long-term impacts of deworming. However, we are interested in funding projects to collect new data that would allow us to refine both our estimate of the effect size from deworming treatment and our replicability adjustment. For example, though we haven’t yet published a page about this, we recently recommended additional funding to the University of Washington for the ongoing DeWorm3 research study. This funding will support the principal investigators of DeWorm3 to create a plan to track medium- and long-term impacts on the study participants.
Additionally, in 2020 we introduced a new model to improve the methodology with which we estimate worm burden (more here). This is an important input into our cost-effectiveness analysis, given that one of our key uncertainties about deworming is the greater infection intensity among study participants in Miguel and Kremer 2004 relative to communities likely to be treated in deworming campaigns today. This update resulted in substantial changes to our cost-effectiveness estimates for some, though not all, programs and locations.
We also hope to write more and more clearly about the decisions we made in creating our current CEAs for deworming programs. However, much of our focus these days is on finding new granting opportunities to keep pace with our funds raised (see this blog post for more), and given existing capacity specifically on the research team that makes decisions about our deworming CEAs, we’re unsure of when we’ll be able to get to this.
Is GiveWell considering the use of smart contracts to enforce donation matching? Smart contracts are good at solving some thorny coordination and incentive problems.
For example, a donor who wishes to give to a non-recommended charity A could set up a contract where they will give $X to charity A, unless another donor commits to give $X to GiveWell, in which case the contract forces the first donor to give the $X to GiveWell as well.
I think it’s great that we should focus on treating malaria as the cost per life saved is relatively low and it has such a high yearly death toll. I was wondering, however, if there are any charities that you would recommend who are working on ways to eradicate malaria long term. I’m relatively new to the idea of EA and was wondering what the thinking is on diverting funds towards preventative measures rather than treatment. Apologies if this has been covered already.
Hi, Sheridan,
We haven’t considered this before; thanks for bringing it to our attention. Though the idea is interesting, enforcing matches between donors seems to fall outside of our remit. We see our responsibility to donors as primarily to provide information to help them direct their donations, and not to facilitate coordination among them. However, we support donors exploring ways to achieve their goals for supporting effective giving.
Hi, Sam,
Thanks for your comment! No worries about the retreading of any old ground; we’re happy to make our views more legible to readers.
To clarify, all the malaria-focused programs that we currently support work on malaria prevention rather than treatment. The Against Malaria Foundation distributes long-lasting insecticide-treated nets (LLINs) that protect against malaria-carrying mosquitoes, and Malaria Consortium protects children against malaria during the high season of transmission via its seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) program. (Malaria Consortium operates other malaria programs besides SMC, and some of those do include treatment, but our recommendation is only for its SMC program. We’ve also directed funding to Malaria Consortium for LLIN distribution.) Other interventions we’ve investigated, like intermittent preventive treatment for malaria (IPTi) and the RTS,S malaria vaccine, are also preventive.
We don’t have recommendations for programs specifically targeting malaria eradication over the longer term. In general, we see our strength in identifying opportunities to help people in low- and middle-income countries over a relatively short period of time, and there continue to be large unfilled funding gaps in shorter-term malaria prevention. However, we note that all of the malaria interventions named above can be part of a country’s long-term malaria eradication strategy.
Additionally, Open Philanthropy, whose work includes identifying opportunities to explicitly help future generations, has made a couple of grants related to malaria eradication that you may be interested to read about, here and here.
Fantastic,
Thank you for getting back to me and for the links!
Cheers
Sam
I think a quick win for accessibility would be to change your all caps navigation bar and footer to sentence case. I struggled to correctly type my email address in the email subscription box because it appeared in (small) all caps.
The same goes for other areas of the site – for example your “XYZ COMMENTED ON” lines in the comments sidebar.