It might be interesting for GiveWell to have a page where you collect various reasons stated by charities or funders for their lack of transparency or accountability and to unpick the shaky logic those reasons are based on.

Or perhaps this could be a regular column for a newspaper or magazine, a bit like the UK’s Guardian newspaper has a ‘Bad Science’ weekly column which highlights egregious science reporting.

Does GiveWell share a hypothesis that increasing transparency and accountability will in the long term tend to increase the size of the pie of total individual giving, plus direct a higher proportion of individual giving to causes with a high ROI in terms of quality-adjusted life-years (compared, say, to giving to one’s former educational institution)? I think these are reasonable hypotheses. Is it part of GiveWell’s plan to assess these potential effects?

Michael Kremer and Edward Miguel, “The Illusion of Sustainability”.

“Research is a critical component of our mission and always has been. But research alone won’t save lives. People need to be able to access the research, and they need knowledge”? What does that mean? I think most people believe that “research” means “research trying to find a cure for breast cancer.” I assume that if you manage to find a cure for cancer, everyone will know about it and there will be no need for an education campaign.

I agree that people would need help accessing such a cure (health care costs are enormous), but you haven’t found it yet, so you’re putting the cart a bit before the horse!

As for making screening available to low-income people, I take your committment to such things with a grain of salt, given that you just cut your funding for cancer-related screening from Planned Parenthood.

If you’re talking about awareness of cancer generally (what “research” is involved there, I don’t know), I think everyone’s already aware of cancer.

I’m an ethical (still moderate) vegetarian, and I give my fair (for now too small) monthly share to SCI. I also happen to give a small amount to animal charities (annual subscription fees) and I adopted a stray cat. This would make me sort of an animal friend, as well as someone contributing to human welfare. But this may not be the most cost-effective way to do so, or so it seems.

Yet I feel concerned that I have to give some weight to animals because of the certainty that, if no one does, then this will considerably increase the amount of their suffering. Some animal charities do a fairly nice job of making people aware of the harms animals suffer as a result of our living. And such living includes experimenting on them in order to improve human wellbeing. This seems to show that calculations may be much more complicated than it seems once you take that into account.

As someone who is concerned with the fate of all, I am truly concerned that I’m contributing to harm non-humans by willingly contributing to save human lives.