Note: this is an unusually long and abstract post whose primary purpose is to help a particular subset of our audience understand our style of reasoning. It does not contain substantive updates on our research and recommendations. GiveWell – both our traditional work and GiveWell Labs – is fundamentally about maximization: doing as much good as…
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Potential U.S. policy focus areas
Throughout the post, “we” refers to GiveWell and Good Ventures, who work as partners on GiveWell Labs. [Added August 27, 2014: GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.] Previously, we laid out our basic framework and reasoning for selecting U.S. policy causes to focus on for GiveWell Labs. This post goes through…
Narrowing down U.S. policy areas
Throughout the post, “we” refers to GiveWell and Good Ventures, who work as partners on GiveWell Labs. [Added August 27, 2014: GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.] As part of our work on GiveWell Labs, we’ve been exploring the possibility of getting involved in policy-oriented philanthropy (see our previous posts on…
The importance of committing to causes
Updated Sept. 12, 2014 to change “GiveWell Labs” to “Open Philanthropy Project,” in line with our August 2014 announcement.Throughout the post, “we” refers to GiveWell and Good Ventures, who work as partners on the Open Philanthropy Project. In our work on the Open Philanthropy Project, we’ve consistently found that the level of interest we show in a…
Our writeup on criminal justice reform
[Added August 27, 2014: GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.] We’ve just published an extensive writeup on the cause of U.S. criminal justice reform, which was one of the causes we previously listed as a priority for investigation under GiveWell Labs. We first became interested in this cause when our initial…
A promising study re: Development Media International
Development Media International (DMI), an organization that “runs radio and TV campaigns to change behaviours and save lives in developing countries,” recently released preliminary midline results from a randomized controlled trial. These results imply that exposure to DMI’s content caused people to take up a variety of behaviors (including early initiation of breastfeeding and various…