The GiveWell Blog

Anonymity rocks

I’ve been flooding our readers lately, so today I just want to brag a little bit about an aspect of our application process. We provide a public online discussion forum as one way for our applicants to ask questions and give feedback. One of the advantages of that it lets our applicants criticize us anonymously…

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My favorite cause

This is a response to the Giving Carnival topic I posted a couple days ago. I’m passionate about all of the 2007 Clear Fund causes, and about many others as well, but the one that revs me up the most is inner-city education in wealthy societies. The reasons for this are complicated and tough to…

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Giving Carnival 8/07: Bare your soul

This blog is hosting the Giving Carnival this week. The Giving Carnival is a horrible name for the following: the host chooses a topic, anyone who wants to writes/submits a post on that topic, and the host posts links to the ones he wants to (in a space this small, generally everyone) with commentary. It’s…

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Wanna get pumped about GiveWell?

Read the debate over at Tactical Philanthropy, on the following question: Clarity in charity – good or bad? (My wording.) It reminds me of when I used to read really old arguments for democracy and free speech (I’m talking about Locke, John Stuart Mill, etc.) and think, “Huh, there were people who disagreed with this…

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Hangover

That last post was a doozy, wasn’t it. Please read it, though, if you get a chance, because this is really important. It’s my first attempt in a while to do what I’ve been saying forever that we can do: put the reasoning behind our decisions in writing, so that you can see the basis…

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I believe that the children are our future

Here’s what I’ve learned in two days of reading up on early child care (Cause 3). This is as rough as a draft gets, but I’m still going to provide references, a summary, and a roadmap, because those things are all so useful. In a nutshell: it’s at least possible to make an amazingly big…

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