GiveWell Blog

I think the idea the future lives have value, and the value of those lives can outweigh the value of actual living people today is extremely immoral. To quote[1]: > In Astronomical Waste, Nick Bostrom makes a more extreme and more specific claim: that the number of human lives possible under space colonization is so great that the mere possibility of a hugely populated future, when considered in an “expected value” framework, dwarfs all other moral considerations. [1] https://blog.givewell.org/2014/07/03/the-moral-value-of-the-far-future…

It seems like you envision paying Americans to eat less meat? In the grand scheme of things, Americans are very expensive people. For example, Argentinians both eat a lot of meat, and are currently in dire need for some hard currency. I don't know if there's an app for this. However, you could do the next best thing and find a charity that works on promoting eating-less-meat in Argentina. (Argentina is just an example, I have no clue whether it's the best value for money for this very specific. I'm just fairly sure that they are better value for money than spending money in the US.) https://blog.givewell.org/2010/12/27/animal-welfare-charities/ might be an interesting read.

Plenty of people are pushing ineffective altruism https://blog.givewell.org/2009/12/28/celebrated-charities-that-we-dont…

Givewell decided to make this recommendation despite ongoing disputes in the literature. There was so much uncertainty about the long-term effects that at least as of 2016, they actually discounted the expected benefit by 100x. See https://blog.givewell.org/2016/12/06/why-i-mostly-believe-in-worms/

I don't buy into donation matching. I think if those wealthy people and organizations who are matching donations want to donate, they can just go ahead and donate. If they care and have the money and are going to refuse to donate it unless people of limited means donate, I don't want to encourage that behavior. I also want to donate to the cause that I feel is most important for me to support, not to who has the best deal. Edit: searched for articles about it, found this: https://blog.givewell.org/2011/12/15/why-you-shouldnt-let-donation-mat…

David Roodman wrote an excellent 4-part analysis of risks from geomagnetic storms for the givewell blog: https://blog.givewell.org/tag/geomagnetic-storms/

Having a higher threshold for publication can be imposed without detailing who does what work. You might argue that this means less research will get produced, but it's probably worth it. Practitioners underestimate the difficulty of transferring knowledge to outsiders because of frictions due to trust, clarity, and tacit knowledge. http://blog.givewell.org/2016/01/19/the-importance-of-gold-standard-st…

Here is a detailed report about the room for more funding in several standout charities: http://blog.givewell.org/2015/11/18/our-updated-top-charities-for-givi… They are all significantly under funded. The best of them distributes long lasting insecticide treated nets which protect against malaria. Below is an estimate (via google doc) that pegs the cost per life saved via nets at around $2,800. The estimate only considers the nets' mortality effect on children under 5 years old. http://files.givewell.org/files/DWDA%202009/Interventions/GiveWell_cos… And below is more general information on this charity: http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/AMF

David Roodman at GiveWell has an excellent series looking into geomagnetic storms, and published the last of four posts today: http://blog.givewell.org/2015/08/21/coming-down-to-earth-what-if-a-big…

It turns out that the nets in question came from net distributors with shoddy follow-up practices; GiveWell suggested Against Malaria instead of other distributors in part because they saw this issue years ago. http://blog.givewell.org/2015/02/05/putting-the-problem-of-bed-nets-us… https://www.againstmalaria.com/NewsItem.aspx?newsitem=Net-use-and-the-…

Cochrane is very good at what they do. This kind of systematic review is the highest standard of evidence when it comes to medical research. It's worth checking out some of their other reviews: http://www.cochrane.org/cochrane-reviews/top Note that these are abstracts of the full reviews (which they charge for access). On a side note, meta-research deserves more funding! http://blog.givewell.org/2013/06/06/meta-research-update/ edit: I linked to the wrong review before (not the one under discussion), so I edited that out. As gwern mentions in another comment, the link is broken in the BBC article. nairteashop found a different news release which seems to be the right link: http://www.cochrane.org/features/tamiflu-relenza-how-effective-are-the…

For some discussion about Zidisha vs GiveDirectly search "Zidisha" in the comments of these two articles: 1)http://blog.givewell.org/2012/04/26/microfinance-and-cookstoves 2)http://blog.givewell.org/2013/01/04/cash-transfers-vs-microloans/ Would love to hear Kurnia's thoughts on this.

It's just not clear to me how more cash will help. It seems that the major problems involve the logistics of getting rescuers and supplies to people who need them, and money isn't the limiting factor there. GiveWell seems to agree: http://blog.givewell.org/2011/03/15/update-on-how-to-help-japan-fundin…

Here's the best article I've seen about how to donate: http://blog.givewell.org/2011/03/11/japan-earthquaketsunami-disaster-r… "At this point we strongly recommend holding off on giving to this relief/recovery effort. We believe that money isn’t a cure-all, and that there can be such a thing as an 'overfunded' relief effort even in a devastating disaster. We don’t know yet whether that is the case with Japan, but we believe that the next few days will bring valuable information about it (and we will be providing updates in this space). We also believe that waiting a few days will not diminish the impact of your donations."

I wouldn't argue there's a difference except that "EA" taken as a whole probably has way less overhead than Susan G. Komen (for example). If (if!) a breast cancer charity running ads drastically increases the amount of money they get in donations, that's probably a good thing up until the point that the marginal benefit to breast cancer researchers of the charity running more ads outweighs the marginal benefit to breast cancer researchers of just getting the money. If $1 in ads consistently brought in $2 of donations, it'd seem like the right thing to do to run a ton of ads, even if we agree running ads about breast cancer or AI or malaria nets or tickets to the opera for inner city youth is not intrinsically valuable. I think I can speak for EAs when I say overhead is not the greatest metric by which to judge a charity[1]. I understand why it's an intuitive one, and overhead is probably correlated with measures of effectiveness, but if your targets are concrete enough you can just... actually measure effectiveness. [1]: https://blog.givewell.org/2009/12/01/the-worst-way-to-pick-a-charity/

Hi, thanks for your interest! Our fund managers work at the Open Philanthropy project, where they work full-time, finding the very best donation opportunities. They look for charities working in their key focus areas, which have a good track record and a robust evidence base to support their chosen intervention. If the program you'd like to recommend is within one of their key focus areas, run some quick calculations to check if the charity you'd like to recommend is within the same range of cost-effectiveness as the previous grantees. If so - great! we'd love to hear about it, and I'd recommend you get in touch with the program officer in charge of the program area your non-profit targets. We recommend running this quick test because while many non-profit programs have a plausible story for impact, very few non-profits surpass our stringent bar for effectiveness. GiveWell is especially excited to see non-profits working on these intervention areas http://blog.givewell.org/2015/10/15/charities-wed-like-to-see/

Dear Modern Microcredit, I am surprised that you find Zidisha to be insufficiently transparent. Zidisha has room for improvement in many respects, but we've always considered transparency to be a strong point of our platform. We have more detailed statistics on repayment rates, trends in repayment performance over time, and risk levels in currently outstanding loans than any other microlending website I know. For example, Kiva, Kiva Zip, United Prosperity, and other well-known microlending websites do not even publish Portfolio At Risk statistics. Since Zidisha is a direct P2P model, our repayment rate is not inflated by "phantom payments" reported by local intermediary partners. (http://blog.givewell.org/2009/10/13/kiva-repayment-data/) When we report a repayment as having been made, that means the borrower truly did make that payment. We make it very clear to prospective lenders that lending through Zidisha is risky. Here are some excerpts from our website: "Zidisha is a low-cost nonprofit community managed by volunteers. Our purpose is to connect individuals in marginalized countries with the chance to improve their lives through affordable loans. We are not a financial institution or an investment service, and Zidisha is not a safe place to store your savings or financial assets. We recommend you treat lending through Zidisha as a philanthropic activity, and that you not lend any funds that you cannot afford to lose." (first paragraph, Trust and Security,…

More from one of cjbprime's sources: GiveWell does a lot of evaluation of charities, trying to find where an individual donor's dollar can make the most difference. They hold donations to GiveDirectly to a pretty high standard, comparing it against stuff like antimalarial bednets and deworming, and think it comes out looking alright. In addition to cjbprime's link, they've written: 1) Cash transfers intervention report--talking about where recipients spend the money, GiveWell's worries about transfers, and studies on the topic: http://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/cash-transfer… 2) The Case For Cash--posted after their recommendation of GiveDirectly, talking about how a one-time cash transfer can have long-term benefits and how giving to the third-world poor differs from giving to the U.S. poor: http://blog.givewell.org/2012/12/26/the-case-for-cash-2/ 3) Responses to objections on cash transfers--mostly about more in-the-weeds issues, like how to interpret their numerical comparisons among cash, bednets and deworming: http://blog.givewell.org/2013/07/31/responses-to-objections-on-cash-tr… They produce a lot of thoughtful research with a lot of effort to ground their recommendations in reality--browsing around their site a bit is a pretty rewarding use of time if you're interested in this kind of thing.

I've found Givewell to be incredibly analytical and thoughtful in their analysis of how to get the most bang for the nonprofit buck, and I always consult them before giving. I'd encourage everyone to visit GiveWell next time they have some reason they're going to give money (or some area they want to give to) but they're not sure to whom to give. For an example of their work, an analysis of the value of giving cash directly to those in need (instead of, say, a cow): http://blog.givewell.org/2012/12/26/the-case-for-cash-2/ Their top recommended charities: http://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities (Fwiw: before I entered tech I was a consultant helping big foundations (like Gates, Packard, etc.) assess their performance (as part of http://www.effectivephilanthropy.org). So for a tech person I consider myself reasonably well-versed in nonprofit evaluation--and how difficult it is.)

I can't say I hate him, but I don't think the past decade of his various efforts has "redeemed him", as it were. I don't think he's "unredeemable", and he certainly deserves a lot of positive credit for a lot of things. To me it seems like many people laud his charity efforts, but for them it's frequently an unexamined praise because "charity" is an effective applause light. It's hard to imagine that much cash attached to a charity not doing something good. (For some older criticisms, see http://blog.givewell.org/category/gates-foundation/ There's also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundation#Critici… ) Anyway, it's worth remembering why people didn't like him in the first place. Most of those reasons have to do with long-term effects of our world, not petty things like he ate toe fungus or yelled at someone. It's not like Bill Gates stole some candy which is easy to redeem for, it's like he (excuse the very loose analogy) killed people, which is much harder to make up for and has longer (in that case, permanent for the dead person) consequences. I think Erik Naggum captured part of the problem of Gates as opposed to Microsoft pretty well in one of his rants: http://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/[email protected] "the problem I see is not that Bill Gates has shaped the world of useless trinkets in software, but has also managed to spread his competitiveness and his personal fear of losing to imaginary competitors to businesses and…

This is Holden Karnofsky, co-founder of GiveWell. Mark, we're glad to see your new project, and we appreciate the kind words re: respect for what we do. A couple points of clarification: 1. We don't claim (and have never claimed) that our recommended charities are the only ones worthy of support. Our goal is to identify, and drive money to, outstanding charities; our audience is donors who want to do as much good as possible, but don't have the time/resources to research charities on their own. We recognize that our methodology is not the only way to identify promising groups (though we believe it is most efficient for serving our audience). Think of us as investors: we work to find outstanding opportunities, but don't claim that all non-recommended opportunities are bad ones. You can see more about how we think about this issue at http://blog.givewell.org/2009/05/07/small-unproven-charities/ 2. In your analogy, it seems to me that the problem with "that kid's" behavior is that you can't unilaterally decide whom to marry. But you pretty much have your pick of where to give - there aren't any major charities that will turn you down as a donor. Given that situation, why not give to the best charity/charities you can find? We don't encourage anyone to "sleep alone," i.e., not give to charity. Our recommendations aren't for everyone. We recognize the value of Philanthroper as a way to hopefully get people to give more than they would otherwise, and wish you the best with…

This isn't actually a very good way to assess whether a nonprofit is good: https://blog.givewell.org/2009/12/01/the-worst-way-to-pick-a-charity/ What you actually need to do is assess whether the nonprofit's program works. But that's really hard.

In addition to the criticism raised by others: just look at the new list of 'approved' charities. Holy cow. Talk about ineffective altruism! Obligatory Links: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/09/politics-isnt-a.html https://blog.givewell.org/2009/12/14/charity-isnt-about-helping/ https://www.amazon.com/The-Elephant-in-Brain-audiobook/dp/B07H8K4G9G/

The enormous risk factor from the article is malnutrition. Givewell, an organization which specializes in estimating the cost-effectiveness of forms of charitable giving, suggests treating acute malnutrition could be extremely cost effective, costing a few thousand dollars to save a life. https://blog.givewell.org/2021/11/19/malnutrition-treatment/

Kiva has always seemed to have people who aren't fans of the model and has had problems in the past[0]. Lately it's been more of a feeling, the messaging has a corporate spin to it that makes it harder to give them the benefit of the doubt. A specific thing is they have done recently made the page where you withdraw funds harder to use, and it seems like they have stopped sending emails to me when I have funds available in my account. [0]https://blog.givewell.org/2009/11/16/not-our-last-words-on-the-kiva-co…

If you're interested, you should read GiveWell's detailed analysis of why it's reasonable to believe this (i.e. the efficacy of the charity to date, whether additional money will be spent with similar efficacy, etc.) and really form an opinion for yourself about whether it's true. Then, act on that opinion. https://www.givewell.org/charities/amf You might also want to read this meta-discussion by GiveWell on such analyses: https://blog.givewell.org/2011/08/18/why-we-cant-take-expected-value-e…

Perhaps of interest: GiveWell touched on the ‘Worm Wars’ here: https://blog.givewell.org/2016/12/06/why-i-mostly-believe-in-worms/

Chronic hunger in (at least) the US appears to be essentially non-existent for children: https://blog.givewell.org/2009/11/26/hunger-here-vs-hunger-there/

https://blog.givewell.org/2018/06/29/givewells-money-moved-and-web-tra… I feel like that pretty comprehensively answers your question. Givewell is a[n ea affiliated] charity which empirically evaluates the effectiveness of other charities, and aims to convince charitable givers to give to those they deem most effective. They've had a lot of success in this goal. Their top charities are listed and in depth reasoning for their evaluations are available.

This isn't a study, but as far as the science of philanthropy goes I know of no one better to look to than GiveWell and they did write a blog post about it: https://blog.givewell.org/2011/12/20/give-now-or-give-later/