GiveWell Blog

I can't say I hate him, but I don't think the past decade of his various efforts has "redeemed him", as it were. I don't think he's "unredeemable", and he certainly deserves a lot of positive credit for a lot of things.

To me it seems like many people laud his charity efforts, but for them it's frequently an unexamined praise because "charity" is an effective applause light. It's hard to imagine that much cash attached to a charity not doing something good. (For some older criticisms, see http://blog.givewell.org/category/gates-foundation/ There's also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundation#Criticism )

Anyway, it's worth remembering why people didn't like him in the first place. Most of those reasons have to do with long-term effects of our world, not petty things like he ate toe fungus or yelled at someone. It's not like Bill Gates stole some candy which is easy to redeem for, it's like he (excuse the very loose analogy) killed people, which is much harder to make up for and has longer (in that case, permanent for the dead person) consequences. I think Erik Naggum captured part of the problem of Gates as opposed to Microsoft pretty well in one of his rants: http://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/3141310154691952@naggum.no.html

"the problem I see is not that Bill Gates has shaped the world of useless
trinkets in software, but has also managed to spread his competitiveness
and his personal fear of losing to imaginary competitors to businesses
and…

This is Holden Karnofsky, co-founder of GiveWell. Mark, we're glad to see your new project, and we appreciate the kind words re: respect for what we do. A couple points of clarification:

1. We don't claim (and have never claimed) that our recommended charities are the only ones worthy of support. Our goal is to identify, and drive money to, outstanding charities; our audience is donors who want to do as much good as possible, but don't have the time/resources to research charities on their own. We recognize that our methodology is not the only way to identify promising groups (though we believe it is most efficient for serving our audience). Think of us as investors: we work to find outstanding opportunities, but don't claim that all non-recommended opportunities are bad ones.

You can see more about how we think about this issue at http://blog.givewell.org/2009/05/07/small-unproven-charities/

2. In your analogy, it seems to me that the problem with "that kid's" behavior is that you can't unilaterally decide whom to marry. But you pretty much have your pick of where to give - there aren't any major charities that will turn you down as a donor. Given that situation, why not give to the best charity/charities you can find? We don't encourage anyone to "sleep alone," i.e., not give to charity.

Our recommendations aren't for everyone. We recognize the value of Philanthroper as a way to hopefully get people to give more than they would otherwise, and wish you the best with…

Dear Modern Microcredit,

I am surprised that you find Zidisha to be insufficiently transparent. Zidisha has room for improvement in many respects, but we've always considered transparency to be a strong point of our platform.

We have more detailed statistics on repayment rates, trends in repayment performance over time, and risk levels in currently outstanding loans than any other microlending website I know. For example, Kiva, Kiva Zip, United Prosperity, and other well-known microlending websites do not even publish Portfolio At Risk statistics.

Since Zidisha is a direct P2P model, our repayment rate is not inflated by "phantom payments" reported by local intermediary partners. (http://blog.givewell.org/2009/10/13/kiva-repayment-data/) When we report a repayment as having been made, that means the borrower truly did make that payment.

We make it very clear to prospective lenders that lending through Zidisha is risky. Here are some excerpts from our website:

"Zidisha is a low-cost nonprofit community managed by volunteers. Our purpose is to connect individuals in marginalized countries with the chance to improve their lives through affordable loans. We are not a financial institution or an investment service, and Zidisha is not a safe place to store your savings or financial assets. We recommend you treat lending through Zidisha as a philanthropic activity, and that you not lend any funds that you cannot afford to lose." (first paragraph, Trust and Security,…

More from one of cjbprime's sources: GiveWell does a lot of evaluation of charities, trying to find where an individual donor's dollar can make the most difference. They hold donations to GiveDirectly to a pretty high standard, comparing it against stuff like antimalarial bednets and deworming, and think it comes out looking alright. In addition to cjbprime's link, they've written:

1) Cash transfers intervention report--talking about where recipients spend the money, GiveWell's worries about transfers, and studies on the topic:
http://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/cash-transfers

2) The Case For Cash--posted after their recommendation of GiveDirectly, talking about how a one-time cash transfer can have long-term benefits and how giving to the third-world poor differs from giving to the U.S. poor: http://blog.givewell.org/2012/12/26/the-case-for-cash-2/

3) Responses to objections on cash transfers--mostly about more in-the-weeds issues, like how to interpret their numerical comparisons among cash, bednets and deworming: http://blog.givewell.org/2013/07/31/responses-to-objections-on-cash-transfers/

They produce a lot of thoughtful research with a lot of effort to ground their recommendations in reality--browsing around their site a bit is a pretty rewarding use of time if you're interested in this kind of thing.

I wouldn't argue there's a difference except that "EA" taken as a whole probably has way less overhead than Susan G. Komen (for example). If (if!) a breast cancer charity running ads drastically increases the amount of money they get in donations, that's probably a good thing up until the point that the marginal benefit to breast cancer researchers of the charity running more ads outweighs the marginal benefit to breast cancer researchers of just getting the money. If $1 in ads consistently brought in $2 of donations, it'd seem like the right thing to do to run a ton of ads, even if we agree running ads about breast cancer or AI or malaria nets or tickets to the opera for inner city youth is not intrinsically valuable.

I think I can speak for EAs when I say overhead is not the greatest metric by which to judge a charity[1]. I understand why it's an intuitive one, and overhead is probably correlated with measures of effectiveness, but if your targets are concrete enough you can just... actually measure effectiveness.

[1]: https://blog.givewell.org/2009/12/01/the-worst-way-to-pick-a-charity/

Hi, thanks for your interest!

Our fund managers work at the Open Philanthropy project, where they work full-time, finding the very best donation opportunities. They look for charities working in their key focus areas, which have a good track record and a robust evidence base to support their chosen intervention. If the program you'd like to recommend is within one of their key focus areas, run some quick calculations to check if the charity you'd like to recommend is within the same range of cost-effectiveness as the previous grantees. If so - great! we'd love to hear about it, and I'd recommend you get in touch with the program officer in charge of the program area your non-profit targets.
We recommend running this quick test because while many non-profit programs have a plausible story for impact, very few non-profits surpass our stringent bar for effectiveness.

GiveWell is especially excited to see non-profits working on these intervention areas http://blog.givewell.org/2015/10/15/charities-wed-like-to-see/