Our norm of ranking charities by % spent on overheads is very very silly.
That sounds rather overstated. Are there any good charities that spend a lot on overhead? The vast majority of charities, especially as weighted by money, are best thought of as frauds. This is a very crude filter, since most well-intentioned charities still fail to accomplish anything, but hardly silly. The most serious criticism of this filter is that one is not going to give to many charities, so filtering 90% is of limited use.
I think it is no understatement to say that the norm is very, very, silly, though now we are in the territory of arguing about the mapping from real-world consequences to adjectives, i.e. we are arguing about connotations.
The only reason to chose the word “silly” is for the connotations.
Givewell started out asserting that this rule has lots of false negatives, with the real-world predictable consequence of ill-will. The denotation of their statement is far less important than the connotation, but they were wrong there, too.
That sounds rather overstated. Are there any good charities that spend a lot on overhead? The vast majority of charities, especially as weighted by money, are best thought of as frauds. This is a very crude filter, since most well-intentioned charities still fail to accomplish anything, but hardly silly. The most serious criticism of this filter is that one is not going to give to many charities, so filtering 90% is of limited use.
I think it is no understatement to say that the norm is very, very, silly, though now we are in the territory of arguing about the mapping from real-world consequences to adjectives, i.e. we are arguing about connotations.
The only reason to chose the word “silly” is for the connotations.
Givewell started out asserting that this rule has lots of false negatives, with the real-world predictable consequence of ill-will. The denotation of their statement is far less important than the connotation, but they were wrong there, too.
Why is the denotation wrong? It does produce lots of false negatives.
and false positives and creates bad incentives.