[Added August 27, 2014: GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.] To date, our work on GiveWell Labs has been highly exploratory and preliminary, but we’ve recently been refining our picture of what we expect our output to look like in the reasonably near (~1 year) future. Our plans are still tentative,…
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Possible global catastrophic risks
I previously discussed our view that in general, further economic development and general human empowerment are likely to be substantially net positive, and are likely to lead to improvement on many dimensions in unexpected ways. In my view, the most worrying counterpoint to this view is the possibility of global catastrophic risks. Broadly speaking, while…
GiveWell Labs update
[Added August 27, 2014: GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.] While we haven’t spent as much time as hoped on GiveWell Labs, we have made some progress. This post summarizes how we’ve spent our time, what we’ve learned, and what we’re planning next. We’ve put substantial time into each of the…
Challenges of passive funding
[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,”…
GiveWell’s history of philanthropy/philanthropy journalism project
Programs’ track records have always been a major input into our research process. For example, when assessing the case for distributing nets to prevent malaria, we’ve looked for information about the track record of similar programs. As we begin to research other areas where philanthropy could play a role, we similarly want to learn from…
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…