[Added August 27, 2014: GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.] As noted previously, I’ve been investigating the question: How does the “good accomplished per dollar” of life sciences funding compare to that of other giving options (such as LLIN distribution)? At this point, I believe that there is very little in…
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Exploring life sciences funding
[Added August 27, 2014: GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.] As noted previously, I’ve been exploring the question, “What are the best opportunities for funders aiming to contribute to progress in life sciences (i.e., biology and medicine)?” This post lays out what we’ve done to date and how we plan to…
Scientific research funding
[Added August 27, 2014: GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.] One of our priorities over the last few months has been to learn, broadly speaking, about scientific research and the role philanthropy can play in it. Along with political advocacy (which we’ve been writing about recently), we feel that this is…
Update on GiveWell’s funding needs
We continue to seek operating support, and we’ve seen some confusion on the part of donors about whether we think that’s the highest-impact giving opportunity available. This post provides an update on our fundraising; it is aimed at close followers of GiveWell, particularly those who have a high degree of trust/alignment with us and are…
Staff members’ personal donations
For this post, GiveWell staff members wrote up the thinking behind their personal donations for the year. Holden Karnofsky There are good arguments that I shouldn’t give anything this year. I tend to think that future giving opportunities will be better than this year’s, even accounting for the costs of delaying. I expect the best…
Obstacles to “giving as consumption”
GiveWell’s traditional work (the work behind our current top charities) and our work on GiveWell Labs reflect two very different visions of giving. The first, giving as consumption, sees giving as analogous to making a purchase. For every $X one spends, one gets some desirable outcome (such as a life saved), and the goal is…