The GiveWell Blog

Somalia famine: Update

Over the past month, we’ve worked to understand the situation in Somalia and make a recommendation to donors about where they should give. At this point we’re wrapping up our work with the following conclusions: We wouldn’t recommend giving to support Somalia specifically over supporting everyday aid. While the needs are extreme, we aren’t convinced…

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Working for GiveWell

If you’re interested in working or volunteering for GiveWell, now would be a good time to let us know. We’ve been a 7-person team for the last couple of months, but since two of the hires were temporary, we’re soon going to be back down to 5. We were happy with our productivity when we…

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Why we can’t take expected value estimates literally (even when they’re unbiased)

While some people feel that GiveWell puts too much emphasis on the measurable and quantifiable, there are others who go further than we do in quantification, and justify their giving (or other) decisions based on fully explicit expected-value formulas. The latter group tends to critique us – or at least disagree with us – based…

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Donating to the Somalia famine: A brief update

Since our initial post on the Somalia famine, we’ve continued our research to provide a stronger recommendation to donors. We do not yet have enough information to do so. At this point, we maintain our provisional recommendation for Doctors Without Borders (MSF). Over the past 3 weeks, we’ve contacted many aid and UN-based organizations. We’ve…

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Guest post from Vipul Naik

This is a guest post from Vipul Naik about how he decided what charity to support for his most recent donation. We requested this post along the lines of earlier posts by Eric Friedman, Jason Fehr, Ian Turner, and Dario Amodei. Note that this post was written before we published our most recent update on…

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