[Added August 27, 2014: GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.] Something I think about a lot is the spectrum from “passive funding” to “active funding.” By “passive funding,” I mean a dynamic in which the funder’s role is to review others’ proposals/ideas/arguments and pick which to fund, and by “active funding,”…
The GiveWell Blog
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Deep value judgments and worldview characteristics
One purpose of this blog is to be explicit about some of the deep value judgments and worldviews that underlie our analysis and recommendations. As we raise the priority of expanding our research into new causes, this seems like a good time to lay out some of the things we believe – and some of…
Why we recommend so few charities
This post seeks to address a common misconception about our work, and will in the future be linked from an FAQ. We often encounter confusion around the fact that we recommend so few charities. Some take this as a statement that “very few charities are accomplishing good,” but this is very much an incorrect interpretation….
Trying (and failing) to find more funding gaps for delivering proven cost-effective interventions
There are interventions that we believe are – or may be (pending a literature review) – very well supported by evidence, that we’ve been unable to find charities focused on. In 2012, we put a significant amount of effort into trying to find ways donors could pay for further delivery of these interventions, even if…
Update on GiveWell’s plans for 2013
[Added August 27, 2014: GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.] Previously, we wrote about the need to trade off time spent on (a) our charities that meet our traditional criteria vs. (b) broadening our research to include new causes (the work we’ve been referring to as GiveWell Labs). This post goes…
External evaluation of our research
We’ve long been interested in the idea of subjecting our research to formal external evaluation. We publish the full details of our analysis so that anyone may critique it, but we also recognize that it can take a lot of work to digest and critique our analysis, and we want to be subjecting ourselves to…