What’s the reason to think EA Funds (other than the global health and development one) currently funges heavily with GiveWell recommended charities? My guess would have been that that increased donations to GiveWell’s recommended charities would not cause many other donors (including Open Phil or Good Ventures) to give instead to orgs like those supported by the Long-Term Future, EA Community, or Animal Welfare EA Funds.
In particular, to me this seems in tension with Open Phil’s last public writing on it’s current thinking about how much to give to GW recommendations versus these other cause areas (“world views” in Holden’s terminology). In his January “Update on Cause Prioritization at Open Philanthropy,” Holden wrote:
“We will probably recommend that a cluster of ‘long-termist’ buckets collectively receive the largest allocation: at least 50% of all available capital. . . .
We will likely recommend allocating something like 10% of available capital to a “straightforward charity” bucket (described more below), which will likely correspond to supporting GiveWell recommendations for the near future.”
There are some slight complications here but overall it doesn’t seem to me that Open Phil/GV’s giving to long-termist areas is very sensitive to other donors’ decisions about giving to GW’s recommended charities. Contra Ben H, I therefore think it does currently make sense for donors to spend attention distinguishing between EA Funds and GW’s recommendations.
For what it’s worth, there might be a stronger case that EA Funds funges against long-termist/EA community/Animal welfare grants that Open Phil would otherwise make but I think that’s actually an effect with substantially different consequences.
[Disclosure—I formerly worked at GiveWell and Open Phil but haven’t worked there for over a year and I don’t think anything in this comment is based on any specific inside information.]
[Edited to make my disclosure slightly more specific/nuanced.]
I don’t think that statements like this are reliable guides to future behavior. GiveWell / Open Phil changes its strategic outlook from time to time in a way that’s upstream of particular commitments. Even if Open Phil’s claims about its strategic outlook are accurate representations of its current point of view, this point of view seems to change based on considerations not explicitly included. This is basically what I’d expect from a strategic actor following cluster thinking heuristics. In any case, despite Holden’s apparent good-faith efforts to disclose the considerations motivating his actions, such disclosures don’t really seem like they’re high-precision guides to Open Phil’s future actions, and in many cases they aren’t the best explanation of present actions.
The actual causal factors behind allocation decisions by GiveWell and OpenPhil continue to be opaque to outsiders, including me, even though I too used to work there.
Yeah, I don’t think someone doing independent, principled cost-effectiveness analysis would find that the top interventions were anything like GiveWell does, or favor anything like the set of actions that GiveWell and OpenPhil do. I went into some detail in the posts I linked. The relevant standard here is whether which coherent model predicts their actions taken as a whole as the best actions to take, not whether any particular decision is defensible as better than some other particular proposed alternative. (Basically anything can be justified using the latter standard, it’s just a clever arguing contest.)
Suppose I have a radish, a carrot, and a prune. I eat the carrot. Someone asks me why. I respond that I ate the carrot because I like sweet foods, and the carrot was sweeter than the radish. They might reasonably be skeptical of this explanation, since if they’d tried to predict my behavior using the implied decision rule, they’d have predicted that I’d eat the prune rather than the carrot.
I see you as arguing that GW/Open Phil might change its strategic outlook in the future and that their disclosures aren’t high precision so we can’t rule out that (at some point in the future or even today) giving to GW recommended charities could lead Open Phil to give more to orgs like those in the EA Funds.
That doesn’t strike me as sufficient to argue that GW recommended charities funge so heavily against EA funds that it’s “odd to spend attention distinguishing them, vs spending effort distinguishing substantially different strategies.”
Here’s a potentially more specific way to get at what I mean.
Let’s say that somebody has long-termist values and believes that the orgs supported by the Long Term Future EA Fund in expectation have a much better impact on the long-term future than GW recommended charities. In particular, let’s say she believes that (absent funging) giving $1 to GW recommended charities would be as valuable as giving $100 to the EA Long Term Future Fund.
You’re saying that she should reduce her estimate because Open Phil may change its strategy or the blog post may be an imprecise guide to Open Phil’s strategy so there’s some probability that giving $1 to GW recommended charities could cause Open Phil to reallocate some money from GW recommended charities toward the orgs funded by the Long Term Future Fund.
In expectation, how much money do you think is reallocated from GW recommended charities toward orgs like those funded by the Long Term Future Fund for every $1 given to GW recommended charities? In other words, by what percent should this person adjust down their estimate of the difference in effectiveness?
Personally, I’d guess it’s lower than 15% and I’d be quite surprised to hear you say you think it’s as high as 33%. This would still leave a difference that easily clears the bar for “large enough to pay attention to.”
Fwiw, to the extent that donors to GW are getting funged, I think it’s much more likely that they are funging with other developing world interventions (e.g. one recommended org’s hits diminishing returns and so funding already targeted toward developing world interventions goes to a different developing world health org instead).
I’m guessing that you have other objections to EA Funds (some of which I think are expressed in the posts you linked although I haven’t had a chance to reread them). Is it possible that funging with GW top charities isn’t really your true objection?
Update: Nick’s recent comment on the EA Forum sure suggests there is a high level of funging, though maybe not 100%, and that giving a very large amount of money to EA Funds to some extent may cause him to redirect his attention from allocating Open Phil money to allocating EA Funds money. (This seems basically reasonable on Nick’s part.) So it’s not obvious that an extra dollar of giving to EA Funds corresponds to anything like an extra dollar of spending within that focus area.
Overall I expect *lots* of things like that, not just in the areas where people have asked questions publicly.
I don’t understand why this is evidence that “EA Funds (other than the global health and development one) currently funges heavily with GiveWell recommended charities”, which was Howie’s original question. It seems like evidence that donations to OpenPhil (which afaik cannot be made by individual donors) funge against donations to the long-term future EA fund.
I’d say that if you’re competent to make a judgement like that, you’re already a sufficiently high-information donor that abstractions like “EA Funds” are kind of irrelevant. For instance, by that point you probably know who Nick Beckstead is, and have an opinion about whether he seems like he knows more than you about what to do, and to what extent the intermediation of the “EA Funds” mechanism and need for public accountability might increase or reduce the benefits of his information advantage.
If you use the “EA Funds” abstraction, then you’re treating giving money to the EA Long Term Future Fund managed by Nick Beckstead as the same sort of action as giving money to the EA Global Development fund managed by Elie Hassenfeld (which has largely given to GiveWell top charities). This seems obviously ridiculous to me if you have fine-grained enough opinions to have an opinion about which org’s priorities make more sense, and insofar as it doesn’t to you I’d like to hear why.
This doesn’t look to me like an argument that there is so much funging between EA Funds and GiveWell recommended charities that it’s odd to spend attention distinguishing between them? For people with some common sets of values (e.g. long-termist, placing lots of weight on the well-being of animals) it doesn’t seem like there’s a decision-relevant amount of funging between GiveWell recommendations and the EA Fund they would choose. Do we disagree about that?
I guess I interpreted Rob’s statement that “the EA Funds are usually a better fallback option than GiveWell” as shorthand for “the EA Fund relevant to your values is in expectation a better fallback option than GiveWell.” “The EA Fund relevant to your values” does seem like a useful abstraction to me.
What’s the reason to think EA Funds (other than the global health and development one) currently funges heavily with GiveWell recommended charities? My guess would have been that that increased donations to GiveWell’s recommended charities would not cause many other donors (including Open Phil or Good Ventures) to give instead to orgs like those supported by the Long-Term Future, EA Community, or Animal Welfare EA Funds.
In particular, to me this seems in tension with Open Phil’s last public writing on it’s current thinking about how much to give to GW recommendations versus these other cause areas (“world views” in Holden’s terminology). In his January “Update on Cause Prioritization at Open Philanthropy,” Holden wrote:
There are some slight complications here but overall it doesn’t seem to me that Open Phil/GV’s giving to long-termist areas is very sensitive to other donors’ decisions about giving to GW’s recommended charities. Contra Ben H, I therefore think it does currently make sense for donors to spend attention distinguishing between EA Funds and GW’s recommendations.
For what it’s worth, there might be a stronger case that EA Funds funges against long-termist/EA community/Animal welfare grants that Open Phil would otherwise make but I think that’s actually an effect with substantially different consequences.
[Disclosure—I formerly worked at GiveWell and Open Phil but haven’t worked there for over a year and I don’t think anything in this comment is based on any specific inside information.]
[Edited to make my disclosure slightly more specific/nuanced.]
I don’t think that statements like this are reliable guides to future behavior. GiveWell / Open Phil changes its strategic outlook from time to time in a way that’s upstream of particular commitments. Even if Open Phil’s claims about its strategic outlook are accurate representations of its current point of view, this point of view seems to change based on considerations not explicitly included. This is basically what I’d expect from a strategic actor following cluster thinking heuristics. In any case, despite Holden’s apparent good-faith efforts to disclose the considerations motivating his actions, such disclosures don’t really seem like they’re high-precision guides to Open Phil’s future actions, and in many cases they aren’t the best explanation of present actions.
The actual causal factors behind allocation decisions by GiveWell and OpenPhil continue to be opaque to outsiders, including me, even though I too used to work there.
ETA: I too used to work at GW/OpenPhil
You mean something other than the cost-effectiveness process and analysis from their website?
Yeah, I don’t think someone doing independent, principled cost-effectiveness analysis would find that the top interventions were anything like GiveWell does, or favor anything like the set of actions that GiveWell and OpenPhil do. I went into some detail in the posts I linked. The relevant standard here is whether which coherent model predicts their actions taken as a whole as the best actions to take, not whether any particular decision is defensible as better than some other particular proposed alternative. (Basically anything can be justified using the latter standard, it’s just a clever arguing contest.)
I’m confused how you distinguish between predicting vs clever arguing if all our data is in the past?
Suppose I have a radish, a carrot, and a prune. I eat the carrot. Someone asks me why. I respond that I ate the carrot because I like sweet foods, and the carrot was sweeter than the radish. They might reasonably be skeptical of this explanation, since if they’d tried to predict my behavior using the implied decision rule, they’d have predicted that I’d eat the prune rather than the carrot.
I see you as arguing that GW/Open Phil might change its strategic outlook in the future and that their disclosures aren’t high precision so we can’t rule out that (at some point in the future or even today) giving to GW recommended charities could lead Open Phil to give more to orgs like those in the EA Funds.
That doesn’t strike me as sufficient to argue that GW recommended charities funge so heavily against EA funds that it’s “odd to spend attention distinguishing them, vs spending effort distinguishing substantially different strategies.”
Here’s a potentially more specific way to get at what I mean.
Let’s say that somebody has long-termist values and believes that the orgs supported by the Long Term Future EA Fund in expectation have a much better impact on the long-term future than GW recommended charities. In particular, let’s say she believes that (absent funging) giving $1 to GW recommended charities would be as valuable as giving $100 to the EA Long Term Future Fund.
You’re saying that she should reduce her estimate because Open Phil may change its strategy or the blog post may be an imprecise guide to Open Phil’s strategy so there’s some probability that giving $1 to GW recommended charities could cause Open Phil to reallocate some money from GW recommended charities toward the orgs funded by the Long Term Future Fund.
In expectation, how much money do you think is reallocated from GW recommended charities toward orgs like those funded by the Long Term Future Fund for every $1 given to GW recommended charities? In other words, by what percent should this person adjust down their estimate of the difference in effectiveness?
Personally, I’d guess it’s lower than 15% and I’d be quite surprised to hear you say you think it’s as high as 33%. This would still leave a difference that easily clears the bar for “large enough to pay attention to.”
Fwiw, to the extent that donors to GW are getting funged, I think it’s much more likely that they are funging with other developing world interventions (e.g. one recommended org’s hits diminishing returns and so funding already targeted toward developing world interventions goes to a different developing world health org instead).
I’m guessing that you have other objections to EA Funds (some of which I think are expressed in the posts you linked although I haven’t had a chance to reread them). Is it possible that funging with GW top charities isn’t really your true objection?
Update: Nick’s recent comment on the EA Forum sure suggests there is a high level of funging, though maybe not 100%, and that giving a very large amount of money to EA Funds to some extent may cause him to redirect his attention from allocating Open Phil money to allocating EA Funds money. (This seems basically reasonable on Nick’s part.) So it’s not obvious that an extra dollar of giving to EA Funds corresponds to anything like an extra dollar of spending within that focus area.
Overall I expect *lots* of things like that, not just in the areas where people have asked questions publicly.
I don’t understand why this is evidence that “EA Funds (other than the global health and development one) currently funges heavily with GiveWell recommended charities”, which was Howie’s original question. It seems like evidence that donations to OpenPhil (which afaik cannot be made by individual donors) funge against donations to the long-term future EA fund.
The definitions of and boundaries between Open Phil, GiveWell, and Good Ventures, as financial or decisionmaking entities, are not clear.
I’d say that if you’re competent to make a judgement like that, you’re already a sufficiently high-information donor that abstractions like “EA Funds” are kind of irrelevant. For instance, by that point you probably know who Nick Beckstead is, and have an opinion about whether he seems like he knows more than you about what to do, and to what extent the intermediation of the “EA Funds” mechanism and need for public accountability might increase or reduce the benefits of his information advantage.
If you use the “EA Funds” abstraction, then you’re treating giving money to the EA Long Term Future Fund managed by Nick Beckstead as the same sort of action as giving money to the EA Global Development fund managed by Elie Hassenfeld (which has largely given to GiveWell top charities). This seems obviously ridiculous to me if you have fine-grained enough opinions to have an opinion about which org’s priorities make more sense, and insofar as it doesn’t to you I’d like to hear why.
This doesn’t look to me like an argument that there is so much funging between EA Funds and GiveWell recommended charities that it’s odd to spend attention distinguishing between them? For people with some common sets of values (e.g. long-termist, placing lots of weight on the well-being of animals) it doesn’t seem like there’s a decision-relevant amount of funging between GiveWell recommendations and the EA Fund they would choose. Do we disagree about that?
I guess I interpreted Rob’s statement that “the EA Funds are usually a better fallback option than GiveWell” as shorthand for “the EA Fund relevant to your values is in expectation a better fallback option than GiveWell.” “The EA Fund relevant to your values” does seem like a useful abstraction to me.