I hereby decree a new publishing schedule. Major posts will be published on Tuesday and Thursday (including today and this Thursday).
The GiveWell Blog
All posts by Holden
Not everyone under-evaluates …
Fundraisers seem to do a phenomenal job. Somehow, you don’t see fundraisers making a lot of arguments that “Money spent on evaluation means less letters mailed out” or “Evaluation is difficult and you can never really isolate causality perfectly.” Instead, you see them testing. And testing. And testing. And learning things that are far from…
Literature reviews
All I was trying to say in the last post could be summed up like this: This is an awesome literature review about early child care programs. It describes how the author found all the papers she discusses … it is totally straightforward about what the methodological strengths and weaknesses of each paper are ……
Microlending: The mystery deepens
Goodness, this post is long and dry. The headline is: I read the paper everyone points to as “hard evidence of microfinance’s effectiveness,” and I came out with tons of questions and a need to visit the library. I’ve learned nothing about how microlending works (is it financing investment? Smoothing consumption? What kinds of activity…
Averages
Averages really annoy me. Average income, average test score, etc. When we’re talking about any kind of analysis of people, I have a hard time thinking of any case where you should be looking at the average of anything. I much prefer “% of people above some threshold” type measures: % of students who graduated…
Experience vs. data, or, why I just muted the Yankees game
So I’ve been watching the ballgame, and it struck me how much sports announcers have impacted my outlook on charity. I can explain. The most common form of “evidence” we get from charities goes something like this: “We don’t have the data, but we’re here, every day. We work with the children, personally. We’ve been…