Doing so revealed to me a myriad of interventions that I’d expect to be higher impact than those endorsed by GiveWell.
Have you talked to GiveWell about this? Like, I don’t know much of anything about charities or the people at GiveWell. But the standard rationalist reaction to “I found something you can read that helps explain the domain you’re in and how to make the world a better place” is supposed to be “give me, give it now”.
(And the reason I ask is the huge potential upside of making GiveWell donations more effective.)
Yes, and they are public, and others have highlighted similar things to them and publicly.
GiveWell is now starting to look into a subset of these things:
To date, most of GiveWell’s research capacity has focused on finding the most impactful programs among those whose results can be rigorously measured. …
GiveWell has now been doing research to find the best giving opportunities in global health and development for 11 years, and we plan to increase the scope of giving opportunities we consider. We plan to expand our research team and scope in order to determine whether there are giving opportunities in global health and development that are more cost-effective than those we have identified to date.
We expect this expansion of our work to take us in a number of new directions,
Over the next several years, we plan to consider everything that we believe could be among the most cost-effective (broadly defined) giving opportunities in global health and development. This includes more comprehensively reviewing direct interventions in sectors where impacts are more difficult to measure, investigating opportunities to influence government policy, as well as other areas.
Have you talked to GiveWell about this? Like, I don’t know much of anything about charities or the people at GiveWell. But the standard rationalist reaction to “I found something you can read that helps explain the domain you’re in and how to make the world a better place” is supposed to be “give me, give it now”.
(And the reason I ask is the huge potential upside of making GiveWell donations more effective.)
Yes, and they are public, and others have highlighted similar things to them and publicly.
GiveWell is now starting to look into a subset of these things:
https://blog.givewell.org/2019/02/07/how-givewells-research-is-evolving/