I’d also be happy to describe our budget and what we might do with increased donations to anyone who’s seriously interested. And folks are welcome to visit us and see what we’re doing. But, yes, there’s room for increased use of progress metrics, measurement of said progress, etc.
I’d also be happy to describe our budget and what we might do with increased donations to anyone who’s seriously interested.
I’m surprised this is not already written, as opposed to only being written on demand for someone ‘seriously interested’; wouldn’t that be a standard part of a donation appeal, ‘we’re spending your money efficiently in these ways and if we got more money, we could do those excellent things’?
How to you measure progress when finding out that you’ve made a mistake and need to dump a bunch of the work you’ve done is likely to be an important part of the task?
Good question. What do you think of how Givewell does it? (Because they do assess their own performance in accord with their overall emphasis on transparency and metrics, and they are also in the research business, so that they, like us, often need to backtrack and re-assess.)
I like the piece from Givewell, but they’re doing things which are much easier to measure.
My impression is that SIAI is at a stage where most of what can be measured is inputs (money raised, hours worked) rather than outputs, and it’s hard to tell whether an output (a new piece of theory, for example) is actually getting closer to one’s goals.
I’m not saying that SIAI’s work is unimportant, but evaluating it may be more a matter of logic than measurement.
That would exclude the SIAI. Does the SIAI publish any kind of progress report?
Yes, at least as newsletters. There’s also the blog.
I’d also be happy to describe our budget and what we might do with increased donations to anyone who’s seriously interested. And folks are welcome to visit us and see what we’re doing. But, yes, there’s room for increased use of progress metrics, measurement of said progress, etc.
I’m surprised this is not already written, as opposed to only being written on demand for someone ‘seriously interested’; wouldn’t that be a standard part of a donation appeal, ‘we’re spending your money efficiently in these ways and if we got more money, we could do those excellent things’?
How to you measure progress when finding out that you’ve made a mistake and need to dump a bunch of the work you’ve done is likely to be an important part of the task?
Good question. What do you think of how Givewell does it? (Because they do assess their own performance in accord with their overall emphasis on transparency and metrics, and they are also in the research business, so that they, like us, often need to backtrack and re-assess.)
I like the piece from Givewell, but they’re doing things which are much easier to measure.
My impression is that SIAI is at a stage where most of what can be measured is inputs (money raised, hours worked) rather than outputs, and it’s hard to tell whether an output (a new piece of theory, for example) is actually getting closer to one’s goals.
I’m not saying that SIAI’s work is unimportant, but evaluating it may be more a matter of logic than measurement.