I understand this point of view, but if Vilalge Reach is clearly so much better than an average health charity (as GiveWell seems to be certain of), shouldn’t they just get other health charities to reallocate a small portion of their vast funds to Village Reach? [...]
VillageReach stands out for transparency, monitoring and evaluation and focus on a cost-effective program. Where this places VillageReach relative to other health charities in impact per dollar depends in some measure on what one’s default assumption is about a charity’s effectiveness in the absence of information. The GiveWell staff have a skeptical default assumption; the plausibility of which can be questioned. Note however that there are charities that that focus on the cause of clean water which is the DCP report lists as being something like 500 times less cost-effective than increased immunization; this pushes in the direction of adopting a skeptical default assumption.
The idea of getting other health charities to reallocate money to VillageReach is an interesting one but I suspect it’s infeasible for political reasons (employees of a generic health charity are motivated to keep the money donated to the charity within the organization as sending it elsewhere might entail layoffs, etc.).
There’s no profit motive attached to providing health services more efficiently so the usual hypotheses of the EMH are not in place. Again recall my earlier comment about donors not paying attention.
In view of this it seems that essentially the only factor that pushes in the direction of EMH in the non-profit world is altruism; but altruism in humans is limited and easily crowded out by tribalism and by (wishful thinking)/(need for self-image preservation).
My observation (e.g. as a student in public high school some time ago) is that there’s a tendency for badly inefficient policies to persist in the non-profit sector because the people who are perpetuating them find it uncomfortable to admit that the policies that they’ve been adhering to are defunct and correspondingly delude themselves into believing that they’re just fine as they are.
Do we see this happening (in which case go ahead and donate to Village Reach), or is everyone ignoring GiveWell (in which case the crowd might have a point, and don’t blindly trust GiveWell).
GiveWell has only been around since 2007 and only has four employees. My impression is that it’s presently little known within the philanthropic sector. Last year they leveraged a million dollars which is only 1⁄300000 of the total U.S. charitable contributions in 2009.
They have not made a systematic attempt to publicize their findings beyond their website up until now (no advertising, etc); so far preferring to focus on making their research and research process more robust with a view toward building a more solid product of broader interest.
In interest of building credibility, GiveWell has been asking outside volunteers to vet their research.
Potential donors seldom reject GiveWell’s recommendations on account of doubting the credibility of their analysis; much more common reasons for rejection are:
Squeamishness about mixing rational analysis with charity on account of seeing rational analysis as “cold and calculation” and charity as “warm and fuzzy.” This is not at all common on LW (!) but fairly common in broader society.
Lack of interest in the causes that GiveWell has covered so far.
Prior commitment to particular charities that they’ve become attached to.
My model [...]
I follow, but your model seems so extreme as to be a self-characiture! :-)
This model is too extreme, but so is naive assumption of no offsets.
VillageReach stands out for transparency, monitoring and evaluation and focus on a cost-effective program. Where this places VillageReach relative to other health charities in impact per dollar depends in some measure on what one’s default assumption is about a charity’s effectiveness in the absence of information. The GiveWell staff have a skeptical default assumption; the plausibility of which can be questioned. Note however that there are charities that that focus on the cause of clean water which is the DCP report lists as being something like 500 times less cost-effective than increased immunization; this pushes in the direction of adopting a skeptical default assumption.
The idea of getting other health charities to reallocate money to VillageReach is an interesting one but I suspect it’s infeasible for political reasons (employees of a generic health charity are motivated to keep the money donated to the charity within the organization as sending it elsewhere might entail layoffs, etc.).
There’s no profit motive attached to providing health services more efficiently so the usual hypotheses of the EMH are not in place. Again recall my earlier comment about donors not paying attention.
In view of this it seems that essentially the only factor that pushes in the direction of EMH in the non-profit world is altruism; but altruism in humans is limited and easily crowded out by tribalism and by (wishful thinking)/(need for self-image preservation).
My observation (e.g. as a student in public high school some time ago) is that there’s a tendency for badly inefficient policies to persist in the non-profit sector because the people who are perpetuating them find it uncomfortable to admit that the policies that they’ve been adhering to are defunct and correspondingly delude themselves into believing that they’re just fine as they are.
GiveWell has only been around since 2007 and only has four employees. My impression is that it’s presently little known within the philanthropic sector. Last year they leveraged a million dollars which is only 1⁄300000 of the total U.S. charitable contributions in 2009.
They have not made a systematic attempt to publicize their findings beyond their website up until now (no advertising, etc); so far preferring to focus on making their research and research process more robust with a view toward building a more solid product of broader interest.
In interest of building credibility, GiveWell has been asking outside volunteers to vet their research.
Potential donors seldom reject GiveWell’s recommendations on account of doubting the credibility of their analysis; much more common reasons for rejection are:
Squeamishness about mixing rational analysis with charity on account of seeing rational analysis as “cold and calculation” and charity as “warm and fuzzy.” This is not at all common on LW (!) but fairly common in broader society.
Lack of interest in the causes that GiveWell has covered so far.
Prior commitment to particular charities that they’ve become attached to.
I follow, but your model seems so extreme as to be a self-characiture! :-)
Agree.
What’s the best evidence against it, or quick test that would be able to at least tell maximally naive model apart from maximally cynical model?
Do we really know totally nothing about that?