The GiveWell Blog

How Do You Value Information?

| by Uri Bram

There’s a common piece of dating advice: before you commit, go on a big trip together. Hopefully the trip itself will be fun, but that’s (almost) beside the point: the real goal is to figure out how smoothly you solve problems together. When it starts raining at 10pm on a Friday and you’re caught outdoors because of a misread-map incident (if we’re being honest: entirely your fault), you’re going to learn a lot about whether your partner reacts to difficulties in a way you’d like to be around for the rest of your life.

The value of what you learn from the trip (a concept called “value of information,” or VOI) can far exceed the direct costs and benefits, because the trip is just for a week and the rest of your life is, well, the rest of your life. If there’s a 10% chance that the trip will show you that you’re not truly compatible, the expected value of that information is higher than any plausible level of (un)happiness you might experience on the trip itself.

Sometimes, the value of information makes the trip worth taking when it wouldn’t have been otherwise—your partner has already scheduled a trip during their time off and it’s very inconvenient for you to join them, but the value of information makes the trip worth it. Other times, you can make choices about the trip in order to increase the value of information you’ll receive: perhaps an all-inclusive beach resort would be more enjoyable today, but a road trip where you camp at different spots each night has a higher value of information and so is ultimately more valuable.

Read more

Research Strategy: Nutrition

| by Marinella Capriati

GiveWell has made several grants in the nutrition space to date—we’ve funded vitamin A supplementation through Helen Keller International for many years, and have made grants supporting both iron fortification and supplementation and community-based management of acute malnutrition. This year, we started systematically exploring nutrition as a grantmaking area.

Our key goal for the year is to learn more about the space. To discipline ourselves, we put down a few hypotheses about nutrition grantmaking. It is quite likely we will change our mind on these as we learn more.

Hypothesis 1: Iron and vitamin A deficiency are the most promising areas for grantmaking

Overall, we think iron and vitamin A deficiency are the most promising areas for grantmaking because of their high burden and because there are programs (fortification and supplementation) that offer tractable and cost-effective ways of addressing this burden.

Read more

Finding and Vaccinating More Children

| by GiveWell Staff

We’re crossposting the first part of a blog post by New Incentives, one of our grantee organizations and Top Charities. New Incentives aims to increase vaccination coverage in Northern Nigeria by providing cash incentives to parents and caregivers.

We recognize that individual stories about a program can be misleading, as they can often highlight the best examples rather than typical cases. However, we hope that this post, about New Incentives’ efforts to reach zero-dose children, can provide another angle for understanding the efforts of our Top Charities.

Read more

Including GiveWell on Your Wedding Registry

| by Chandler Brotak

Planning a wedding is stressful. Questions around who to invite, what to eat, where to take pictures, what kind of music to play—the list goes on and on. But when Lucie and Geoff started planning their big day, at least one element was a no-brainer.

A fundraiser for GiveWell would serve as their wedding registry.

“I think we were pretty aligned since the beginning that we didn’t want to get gifts,” says Lucie. With successful careers and after living together for several years, the couple didn’t feel the need for a traditional wedding registry with household items. Offering a fundraiser instead allowed guests to contribute whatever felt reasonable to them, avoiding the social and financial pressures of buying a registry item.

Lucie and Geoff’s wedding was held in the Czech Republic with a blend of Czech and American guests, and the two cultures celebrate weddings differently—weddings in the US often involve gifts for the couple, while wedding guests in the Czech Republic often bring envelopes of cash instead. “It just seemed better for everyone to have a unified outlet.”

Read more

September 2024 Updates

| by Chandler Brotak

Every month we send an email newsletter to our supporters sharing recent updates from our work. We publish selected portions of the newsletter on our blog to make this news more accessible to people who visit our website. For key updates from the latest installment, please see below!

If you’d like to receive the complete newsletter in your inbox each month, you can subscribe here.

Read more

GiveWell as Moneyball

| by GiveWell Staff

If there’s one group of people who are as obsessed as we are with rigorously analyzing a complicated domain and figuring out where to prioritize scarce resources, it’s Major League Baseball front offices. With that in mind, we wanted to write this guide comparing some baseball statistics with the metrics we take into consideration when evaluating programs to save and improve lives.

Batting Average: Batting average is simple to calculate and easy to explain, and it was historically considered one of the most important ways of evaluating how good a player was. It remains one of the primary baseball stats you’ll find in the newspaper.

But as a measure of a player’s value, batting average isn’t actually all that helpful—and at times can be actively misleading. One of the two primary shortcomings of batting average is that it ignores plate appearances that end in a walk. But walks are really valuable! The Little League wisdom that “a walk is as good as a hit” is an oversimplification, but it also points us toward a statistic that’s more valuable than batting average. It turns out that on-base percentage, which considers walks (as well as the less common hit-by-pitch method of reaching base) as a successful outcome, is a better predictor of a player’s offensive value.

As an example, Juan Pierre and Adam Dunn, who both played in about 2,000 games over their careers, had lifetime batting averages of .295 and .237 respectively. At first glance this might give the impression that Pierre was the more productive hitter. Looking at on-base percentage though, we see that Dunn actually reached base more frequently than Pierre (.364 versus .343), which, combined with his propensity for hitting home runs (another indicator of offensive value that batting average ignores), made him the much more valuable career hitter. (Dunn’s negative defensive contributions are another story.)

Read more