This is excellent! I haven’t judged the quality of their evaluations or how much overlap there is between them and Givewell, but all that aside, this changes the naive-donor pitch from
“Before donating, you should find out which is the most effective charity by checking a charity evaluator such as GiveWell”
to
“Before donating, you should find out which is the most effective charity by checking a charity evaluator such as GiveWell or AidGrade”
That is, having two credible charity effectiveness evaluators makes it possible to pitch the idea of charity effectiveness evaluation without having to also pitch for a specific organization, which implicitly validates the idea and makes it less political.
Good point! But having too many charity effectiveness evaluators might be bad (“who evaluates the charity evaluators?”). Not that I think this is likely to be a problem.
Case in point: Charity Navigator, which places unreasonable importance on irrelevant statistics like administrative overhead. There are already charity effectiveness evaluators out there that are doing counter-productive work.
Personally, I think adding another good charity evaluator to the mix as competition to GiveWell/Giving What We Can is important to the overall health of the optimal philanthropy movement.
This is excellent! I haven’t judged the quality of their evaluations or how much overlap there is between them and Givewell, but all that aside, this changes the naive-donor pitch from
“Before donating, you should find out which is the most effective charity by checking a charity evaluator such as GiveWell”
to
“Before donating, you should find out which is the most effective charity by checking a charity evaluator such as GiveWell or AidGrade”
That is, having two credible charity effectiveness evaluators makes it possible to pitch the idea of charity effectiveness evaluation without having to also pitch for a specific organization, which implicitly validates the idea and makes it less political.
Good point! But having too many charity effectiveness evaluators might be bad (“who evaluates the charity evaluators?”). Not that I think this is likely to be a problem.
GiveToGiveWellWell?
Case in point: Charity Navigator, which places unreasonable importance on irrelevant statistics like administrative overhead. There are already charity effectiveness evaluators out there that are doing counter-productive work.
Personally, I think adding another good charity evaluator to the mix as competition to GiveWell/Giving What We Can is important to the overall health of the optimal philanthropy movement.