One nice thing about Givewell is their commitment to transparency. If you think your time is well spent thinking about optimal giving, you can start with what they’ve written and try to critique it publicly. (Alternatively, first deliberately ignore their recommendations in order to fight priming effects and try to brainstorm your own independent list of effective giving opportunities, then diff it with Givewell’s.)
I think in the long run, the ideal model for effective giving research will be something like the ideal model for science research: publish results, critique the results of others, and try to build on our collective understanding. In the same way that all the world’s scientific research isn’t done by a single organization, I suspect in the long run we will want multiple organizations doing serious thinking about how to give effectively. The big difference with science is that the laws of physics are the same for everyone but not everyone has the same values that motivate their giving. So the ideal output of effective giving research will be something that makes it easy for you to plug your utility function in and learn what organization best achieves your values.
One nice thing about Givewell is their commitment to transparency. If you think your time is well spent thinking about optimal giving, you can start with what they’ve written and try to critique it publicly. (Alternatively, first deliberately ignore their recommendations in order to fight priming effects and try to brainstorm your own independent list of effective giving opportunities, then diff it with Givewell’s.)
I think in the long run, the ideal model for effective giving research will be something like the ideal model for science research: publish results, critique the results of others, and try to build on our collective understanding. In the same way that all the world’s scientific research isn’t done by a single organization, I suspect in the long run we will want multiple organizations doing serious thinking about how to give effectively. The big difference with science is that the laws of physics are the same for everyone but not everyone has the same values that motivate their giving. So the ideal output of effective giving research will be something that makes it easy for you to plug your utility function in and learn what organization best achieves your values.