A recent Scientific American post discusses a study that may indicate an emergence of “behavioral resistance” to insecticide-treated nets. Mosquitoes in Benin were found to shift their “mean catching time” (roughly speaking, the time of day when they were most likely to be active) from 2-3am to 5am; this may indicate changing behavior to attack…
The GiveWell Blog
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Giving to GiveWell’s recommended charities helps GiveWell
GiveWell does not solicit donations from the general public. We cover our operating expenses mostly by privately soliciting donations from people (and institutions) who are big fans of our work. This allows us to operate – when dealing with those outside our “inner circle” – as a pure advisor, without having to “compete with our…
Evaluating people
A crucial consideration, when evaluating a giving opportunity, is: “Who are the people involved?” I believe that any given project is likely to run into many factors that are unexpected (or can’t be captured in the evaluation process), and indeed that such unexpected factors often dominate the expected factors. Therefore, no matter how promising a…
Revisiting the case for insecticide-treated nets (ITNs)
GiveWell seeks to constantly revisit and rethink our content, to make sure that it continues to represent a reasonable interpretation of the currently available facts. To this end, we assigned Jonah Sinick, a Research Analyst, to perform a thorough review of the content most relevant to our #1 charity (the Against Malaria Foundation): the AMF…
Sharing notes from conversations: Case study in pursuing transparency in philanthropy
Early in our history, we got most of our information in the form of documents: grant applications and other documents sent to us by charities, academic literature, etc. Being transparent about why we believe what we believe was thus relatively straightforward: we sought to publish whatever documents we could. Over time, phone and in-person conversations…
US Cochrane Center (USCC) gets our first “quick grant” recommendation
Recently, we did something that may strike many GiveWell followers as out of character. We recommended a $100,000 grant to the US Cochrane Center, despite the fact that we have done relatively little investigation of it so far (compared with our investigations of current top charities)—and have many unanswered questions. Good Ventures, which helped with…