Converging to GiveWell from first principles
Last substantive revision: 2016-08-24
Or “How rational is it to fall in love with GiveWell at first sight?”
Or “How rational is it to fall in love with EA at first sight?”
By “first principles”, I mean to work off of a deliberately stripped-down epistemic framework, where I assume:
- No social connection to the effective altruism community, rationalist community, or GiveWell. The reality is that I tend to have around 100 mutual Facebook friends with “inner” members of the effective altruism community and I’ve been personally involved with the community in various ways. I haven’t personally donated to GiveWell or its recommended charities, but many of the people I have interacted with have.
- One is trying to find the best giving opportunity, that is, a charity or other entity to which one can donate money that would cause the most good. However, to make the exercise more manageable, I restrict consideration to charities in global health and poverty.
- Access to the Wikipedia timeline of nonprofit evaluation. (Disclosure: I wrote the original version of the timeline, which was subsequently expanded by Vipul Naik, who also has involvement with the EA community.) In particular, I assume that one knows about the existence of GiveWell, Charity Navigator, and the Gates Foundation. This mostly saves time Googling for nonprofit evaluators and then trying to obtain independent descriptions of them.
- A comfortable financial position. Note that in reality, I don’t even have a financial buffer or income that allows me to comfortably donate.
- No bias toward a specific intervention. In particular, nothing of the form “My relative is diagnosed with disease X so I feel compelled, on an emotional level, to give to that cause” or “In my childhood, I was disadvantaged in way Y so I want to help people in similar positions to my past self”.
The point of the exercise is that I’m trying to create a “clean environment” where I can reason about topics that effective altruists frequently discuss, but where I don’t bring in their specific takes on things. To be sure, it is an artificial environment, but one which I expect emulates well that of a typical “proto-EA”.
However, I don’t mean “first principles” in some contrived Russellian deductive sense.
Now my question is, given the above setup, i.e. a generally “rational” person inclined to do the most good possible through donations, would one converge on EAs’ favorite causes or GiveWell top-rated charities? How would such a person carry out this investigation? How would they even start? Would they be convinced by GiveWell’s research? Would they clearly see Against Malaria Foundation as the best charity combating malaria?
Generating a list of charities
- GiveWell only really evaluates charities that agree to go along with its evaluation process.
- Looking at how different orgs deal with e.g. malaria. GiveWell recommends AMF but the Gates Foundation donates to Nothing But Nets.
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