The GiveWell Blog

The Most Good You Can Do

| by Holden

The Most Good You Can Do is a new book by Peter Singer. It is an introduction to effective altruism, which we’ve previously defined as “trying to do as much good as possible with each dollar and each hour that we have.”

It emphasizes the importance of giving both generously and effectively – highlighting the role of GiveWell’s charity recommendations – as well as discussing how to do as much good as possible with one’s career, and discussing some of the causes that effective altruists tend to be particularly interested in. It is a broad, well-written introduction to the set of ideas associated with effective altruism, and we highly recommend it to those interested in the topic.

Top charities’ room for more funding

| by Natalie Crispin

In December, we published targets for how much money we hoped to move to each of our top four charities, with the expectation of revisiting these targets mid-year:

In past years, we’ve worked on an annual cycle, refreshing our recommendations each December. This year, because we anticipate closing (or nearly closing) the funding gaps of some of our top charities during giving season and moving a significant amount of money (~$5 million) after giving season before our next scheduled refresh, we plan to update our recommendations based solely on room for more funding in the middle of next year. We’re tentatively planning to do this on April 1st, the earliest we will realistically be able to post an update on charities’ ongoing funding needs that accounts for the funds they will receive over the next few months.

These targets were based on a guess that GiveWell-influenced donors would give $7.5 million to our top four charities in December 2014 to March 2015 (excluding Good Ventures and a $1 million gift to SCI from an individual that we knew about prior to setting the targets). Our actual money moved for this period was about $8.7 million to the top four charities, plus $0.4 million that we can allocate at our discretion and have not yet allocated.

Over the past couple of months, we have spoken with each of our top charities to get updates on how much funding they have received from GiveWell-influenced and other donors and their current room for more funding. In sum, the amounts that our top charities raised as a result of our recommendations were broadly consistent with what we expected and there have not been any significant updates to the charities’ room for more funding. Therefore, we are not revising our recommended allocation (for every $7.5 given, $5 to AMF, $1 to GiveDirectly, $1 to SCI, and $0.5 to Deworm the World) at this time.

Summary for December 2014 to March 2015 (all figures in USD millions):

Charity Target from individuals (Dec 2014) Max from individuals (Dec 2014) Actual from individuals Summary
Against Malaria Foundation 5 5 4.5 Close to target
Schistosomiasis Control Initiative 1 1 1.1 On target
Deworm the World Initiative 0.5 1 0.7 Reached target but did not exceed max
GiveDirectly 1 25 2.4 Reached target but did not exceed max

 

Against Malaria Foundation (AMF)

Donations to AMF from GiveWell-influenced donors were short of our target by about $0.5 million. AMF is currently in discussions about funding several large-scale bednet distributions. It is our understanding that the amount of funding AMF has available is a limiting factor on both how many nets it can provide to each distribution it is considering and on how many discussions it can pursue at one time.

We have written before about AMF’s lack of track record at signing agreements for and successfully completing large-scale distributions with partners other than Concern Universal in Malawi. In 2014, AMF signed its first agreement to fund a large-scale distribution with another partner in a different country: IMA World Health in the province of Kasaï Occidental in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (more). The Kasaï Occidental distribution was scheduled to be completed in late 2014. We have not yet seen results from this distribution, and AMF’s track record of completing and reporting on successful large-scale distributions remains limited. AMF expects to be able to share information from this distribution in the next few weeks.

We plan to continue recommending funds to AMF for now and to reassess AMF’s progress later in the year.

GiveDirectly

In December, we noted that GiveDirectly could likely absorb up to $25 million in funding from GiveWell-influenced individuals. We tracked $2.4 million to GiveDirectly from these individuals and it is possible that GiveWell influenced several million dollars more – between February 2014 and January 2015, GiveDirectly received several million dollars from individuals who did not provide information on how they learned about the organization. We continue to believe that GiveDirectly has substantial room for more funding.

Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI)

In December we set a target of SCI receiving $1 million from GiveWell-influenced individual donors and set the max we aimed for SCI to receive from this group at the same amount. We estimate that SCI received about $1.1 million based on GiveWell’s recommendation.

We have fairly limited information on SCI’s room for more funding because (a) SCI recently began working with a new financial director and is in the process of reorganizing its financial system, and so has not yet been able to provide us with a comprehensive financial update; and (b) SCI held a meeting on March 24 to allocate unrestricted funds and sent us a report from that meeting recently, which we have not yet had time to review. We will be following up with SCI to learn more about its plans and funding needs.

We plan to continue recommending funds to SCI because (a) our room for more funding estimates for SCI are rough and we believe there is a reasonable chance that SCI has room for more funding; (b) we expect to learn more about SCI’s room for more funding in the next few months; and (c) we do not expect SCI to receive a large amount of funding due to our recommendation over the next few months (since most donors give in December).

Deworm the World Initiative, which is led by Evidence Action

In December we set a target of $0.5 million from GiveWell-influenced individual donors to Deworm the World and set the max we aimed for Deworm the World to receive from this group at $1 million. We estimate that Deworm the World received about $0.66 million based on GiveWell’s recommendation.

It’s our understanding that Deworm the World may have opportunities over the next few years to support up to three deworming programs which could each cost several million dollars. We are in the process of following up with Deworm the World to learn more about how likely these programs are to require unrestricted funding from Deworm the World and when funding might become a bottleneck to moving forward with these programs.

We plan to continue recommending funds to Deworm the World.

Investigating neglected goals in scientific research

(updated on: ) | by Holden

A major goal of the Open Philanthropy Project is to explore the topic of scientific research funding, starting with life sciences. This post discusses the process we’ve used so far, including some of the challenges we’ve faced and changes we’ve made in our investigation methods:

  • We first discuss some of the general challenges of finding good giving opportunities in this space.
  • We then introduce the concept of scientific research “gaps” – areas that the existing system doesn’t put enough investment into, leaving potential philanthropic opportunities. One type of gap, which we call a “neglected goal,” has been the focus of many of our efforts so far.
  • We discuss our process so far for investigating neglected goals, and our plans for the future. Future posts will discuss other types of potential gaps that we think could be very important, but would find more difficult to investigate: gaps in high-risk early-stage research and gaps in “translational” research that sits between academic and industry work.

Some challenges of investigating scientific research funding
There are several reasons that we’re finding this space particularly challenging.

One is the sheer level of expertise required. As we’ve written previously, we often don’t feel positioned even to understand the meaning – much less the plausibility – of many key claims. We’ve sought generalist scientific advisors to help us with this issue. My early intuition is that even with strong scientific advisors, it would take far more time to do a shallow investigation for a cause in this space than for a cause in another space, which may mean we have to take more shortcuts in order to arrive at priorities.

Another challenge – discussed more in later sections of this post – is that it seems more difficult to get engagement from relevant experts. When investigating U.S. policy and global catastrophic risks, we’ve found that many of the people we want to talk to see educating the public and/or influencing funders as an essential part of their role. This is often much less true of scientists.

Another challenge is that there is already a lot of funding going toward science (particularly life sciences). Tens of billions of dollars per year come from U.S. government and industry sources (see data we’ve pulled from a government survey on R&D funding at universities (details of the query are in the spreadsheet) (XLS)). In addition, philanthropic sources are significant: Howard Hughes Medical Institute alone spends in the range of $700 million per year. It’s reasonable to ask how much value a new funder – even a relatively large one – can add in this context.

Gaps and neglected goals
In our early conversations, we’ve therefore tried to focus on what we call “gaps” (or sometimes “broad market inefficiencies“) in the current system of scientists, funders and supporting institutions. We’ve sought out institutional constraints, suboptimal incentives, and other factors that might make the current system “miss” particularly strong opportunities to do good. Our hope is that a new funder might be able to do an outsized amount of good by supporting what the existing system can’t or won’t.

One type of gap is what I’ll call a “neglected goal”: a case where the existing system doesn’t put enough investment into solving a particular social problem or developing a particular kind of technology. For example, improving malaria control and elimination efforts is arguably a neglected goal. New drugs, vaccines, and other methods for controlling malaria could result in helping an enormous number of people, mostly low-income people in the developing world. Because relatively few wealthy people are affected by malaria, both government and industry may not put enough funding into the scientific research and development necessary to develop such things. Similar logic could be extended to tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, and other diseases/conditions that primarily affect the global poor. The Gates Foundation has often publicly expressed this line of reasoning.

More broadly, I’m familiar with arguments for many other neglected goals, such as developing in vitro meat (to reduce animal suffering); improving treatment of chronic pain; treating and slowing symptoms of aging; developing methods of food production that are primarily useful in worst-case scenarios; developing biological interventions that enhance people’s abilities rather than simply counteract diseases; and more.

Neglected goals are not the only kinds of gaps we’ve considered. However, they are probably the easiest for non-scientists to understand and engage with. They stem from insufficient societal attention to a particular social problem, rather than issues with the details of how science is pursued. They are the focus of this post; future posts will discuss other types of potential gaps.

Our progress so far on evaluating neglected goals
When exploring an unfamiliar area, we often take the approach of:

  • Starting with a question that seems both (a) relatively tangible and tractable, and (b) reasonably representative of other, future investigations we might do in the area.
  • Being ready to take many wrong turns and rethink our process multiple times, until we come to a satisfying answer to the question.
  • Try to repeat our process for other similar, questions, making it more efficient and systematic over time.

In this case, we decided – about a year ago – to tackle the question: “How much good could we accomplish by funding research and development targeting the needs of the global poor?” This is probably the most straightforward example I know of a potential neglected goal. We recruited a small group of scientific advisors and set up periodic calls and meetings to work on this investigation, though it was a low priority for the year (our main goal was progress on U.S. policy and global catastrophic risks).

This question, while more contained than “What sort of scientific research should we fund?”, is extremely broad. Early in our investigation, we determined that it included the following sub-questions:

  1. Would it be most productive to focus on malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, water/sanitation-related applications, or something else?
  2. What sort of research is likely to be most valuable? Presumably, there is more work being done on diseases like cancer than on diseases like malaria – but where is the gap greatest and most important? For example, would it be best to focus on earlier-stage research or later-stage research?
  3. How should we view the work of the Gates Foundation, which has shown a strong interest in the idea that this sort of research is underfunded? Should we believe that the Gates Foundation is taking the most effective possible approach (in which case the best research in this area would be research the Gates Foundation is funding) or that there are important opportunities it is missing?
  4. How valuable is the most valuable work in this area, compared to other possible uses of money?

After an initial period of better defining these questions, we started scheduling conversations with people who could bring a broad perspective to these questions, help us cut through many possibilities and identify the most promising types of research to support. We sought to speak with people who work on developed-world diseases such as cancer, in order to get perspective on #2 above. We sought to speak with people who have broad, cross-cutting roles working on developing-world diseases, in order to get perspective on #1 and #3.

Unfortunately, we ultimately weren’t able to make the sort of progress we had hoped for using this method. The people we hoped to speak with were not always interested in talking, and when they were it was often off the record. In most cases, we didn’t get much feedback on which types of research were most promising.

Trying a different approach, I spoke with two of our junior scientific advisors about the fields they knew best. I spoke about HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and other areas with Anna Bershteyn of the Institute for Disease Modeling (conversation notes here), and I spoke about malaria (primarily focused on drug development and risks of drug resistance) with Micah Manary, a graduate student specializing in malaria (conversation notes here). For simplicity, I focus here on the second conversation, though similar dynamics applied to both.

Rather than focusing on broad questions about the most promising paths, I aimed to gain a basic understanding of how malaria works, what the shortcomings are in current treatment/control methods, and how new drugs/diagnostics/vaccines/other technologies might help. I learned that one of the most important goals of drug development is simply to stay ahead in the race against drug resistance, which evolves rapidly and presents a major problem. I learned that due to the complexity of the parasite, there’s fairly little basis for predicting what sort of compound might be effective in killing it, so much of drug development comes down to essentially testing random compounds against malaria samples in a lab. Learning these things gave me a basic framework for thinking about how to quantify the humanitarian benefits of malaria-focused research and development: for any given research path (from funding drug development directly to funding higher-risk research aimed at making drug development more efficient), one could estimate the effect on the number of compounds tested per year, and from there estimate the impact of testing additional compounds on the threat of drug resistance among other things. Having this framework in mind made it easier to see how a variety of different research paths could be relevant, and what their benefits might look like.

Details are available via our public notes on the conversation.

We’re still far from having a view on the best research paths for malaria drug development, and we’re still far from an estimate of how much good (per dollar) funding such things would accomplish. However, the process for getting there seems more clearly defined and tractable than it did a year ago. I now see such investigations as ideally consisting of:

  • A scientist who can familiarize himself/herself with how a disease works, what methods we have for controlling it, what potential future technologies might be useful, and what kind of science might help speed these along – while also being available for intensive conversations with GiveWell staff.
  • A GiveWell staffer who can interview the scientist about potential research paths, think about the likely “good accomplished per dollar” of such paths, and work with the scientist to learn more about the most promising ones.

We’re currently working on two such investigations, each involving a different scientific advisor. Due to the complexity of the subjects and the limited time our advisors have available, we expect these investigations to be challenging and to take a few months. As we go, we’ll be thinking about how to make the process more systematic and efficient, how to increase our scientific advisory capacity, and how else we might narrow the field of possible neglected goals to focus on.

General progress and plans for GiveWell as an organization in 2015

(updated on: ) | by Holden

This is the fifth post (of six) we’re planning to make focused on our self-evaluation and future plans.

Previous posts have discussed our 2014 progress on, and 2015 plans for,

This post outlines our plans and thoughts on issues that cut across these two projects, and pertain to GiveWell the organization as a whole.

Our staff has expanded significantly, and we expect to expand further.

  • At the beginning of 2014, we had 11 full-time staff and 1 Conversation Notes Writer; as of today, we have 18 full-time staff and 8 Conversation Notes Writers.
  • Of our current full-time staff, five work primarily on the Open Philanthropy Project, while the other thirteen do a mix of top charities work and cross-cutting work (including managing Conversation Notes Writers, vetting content from both projects, and administrative work). Currently, our payroll expenses are roughly evenly allocated between the two projects.
  • For most of 2013, Holden and Alexander were the only staff putting much time into the Open Philanthropy Project. In 2014, we shifted more of their time to the Open Philanthropy Project, as well as ~all of Howie Lempel’s time. These additions made it possible for the Open Philanthropy Project to make substantial progress, covered previously. Recently, we’ve added two more full-time staff to the Open Philanthropy Project team.
  • Through 2013, Elie was intimately involved in all charity reviews. He participated in most calls with charity representatives and carefully reviewed the details of all charity-review-related written work. This changed substantially in 2014 with newer staff taking on more research and management responsibility. These additions made it possible for GiveWell to produce much more in 2014 than in 2013, as covered previously. In 2014, we added 5 new staff members who primarily work on top-charities-related work. Natalie Crispin is now the direct supervisor for seven staff members.
  • We are hoping to involve more Research Analysts in the Open Philanthropy Project, particularly for helping with writeups of cause investigations and grants. Because of this, and our desire to build still more capacity for evaluating potential top charities, we are hoping to add 4-8 additional Research Analysts over the next 12 months. There are two future Research Analysts (previously Summer Research Analysts) who have accepted offers and are starting mid-year.
  • In addition, we are starting to seek cause-specific hires for the Open Philanthropy Project (discussed previously), and we have started to advertise for an Outreach Associate position to help us continue to maintain relationships with a growing number of people who give significantly to our top charities.

Improving management was a major focus of 2014. With our larger staff, we have put a lot more attention into recruiting-, training- and retention-related matters. We’ve implemented regular one-on-one meetings, employee satisfaction checkins, and a variety of practices to help staff engage with GiveWell and with each other (regular roundtables on topics of interest, social events, etc.) We’ve also been continually experimenting with moving more responsibilities – including management itself – to employees other than Elie, and as of early 2015 Natalie has taken over management of seven employees. We believe that running an organization of this size has some qualitative differences with running a ~5-person organization, and we’ve put deliberate attention into adapting. We may be writing more about this in the future.

We are planning to launch new websites for both GiveWell and the Open Philanthropy Project this year. We are working with the brand experience firm Cibo on both websites, and are aiming to launch both in April. This is a major time investment for us.

We have several reasons for launching new websites. First, the current GiveWell website was created in 2009 on a low budget, and we think it has major room for improvement. Second, creating separate websites for GiveWell and the Open Philanthropy Project is another step in the direction of creating clear separation between the two (more below). Finally, it is possible we will receive an unusual amount of publicity in 2015: we know of three different books on the subject of effective altruism, and one more that will feature it prominently, all slated to be published in 2015.

We are continuing to work toward separating GiveWell and the Open Philanthropy Project as brands, websites, and – eventually – organizations. In 2014, we struggled with confusion between the two. People we contacted as part of our Open Philanthropy Project work often Googled us, looked at GiveWell, and came away with mistaken impressions about what sorts of giving opportunities we seek for the Open Philanthropy Project. We have been taking small steps to ameliorate this (such as more consistent use of openphilanthropy.org email addresses and signatures), and in 2015 we plan to further work toward separation. In addition to launching a new website for the Open Philanthropy Project – to which we will be moving relevant content currently on GiveWell.org – we will begin conversations about what it would look like to form two separate organizations.

At the same time, we still see substantial overlap between the skills needed for the two projects. If GiveWell gets to the point of having spare capacity, this capacity could be very valuable to the Open Philanthropy Project. Such capacity could include Elie Hassenfeld’s time, if GiveWell becomes less dependent on his involvement; it could also include more junior staff, who could help with creating public writeups on our work among other things. Being able to flexibly allocate employees between the two projects is still valuable for us at this time.

Fundraising remains a priority. We are currently fundraising for unrestricted support, supporting a team that is allocated flexibly between Open Philanthropy Project and our more traditional work. Details are at our December 2014 update. For people donating to GiveWell by webform for regranting to top charities, we have added an option to allocate 10% to GiveWell unrestricted.

Outreach is still not a top priority for us. Our top priority for the Open Philanthropy Project is research (finding outstanding giving opportunities); we feel we have a long way to go on this front before it will make sense to put much effort into outreach. Our top priority for GiveWell is strengthening capacity and making the operation sustainable without needing as much involvement from the co-founders, which could result in a stronger Open Philanthropy Project (see above) as well as a more robust GiveWell.

In light of GiveWell’s maturing research process, and some early signs that growth in money moved from smaller donors is slowing (more in our upcoming metrics report), there is a growing argument for putting more effort into outreach. Still, we see strengthening capacity as the more important goal for the coming year, especially in light of (a) the potential benefits for the Open Philanthropy Project; (b) the fact that there are now substantial efforts outside of GiveWell aiming to drive more donations to our top chariites. The latter include several organizations promoting generous, effective giving as well as the books mentioned above.

We are putting substantial time into new websites this year, which we feel is probably the highest-value activity for outreach. In the future, if GiveWell becomes less dependent on co-founder involvement and higher-capacity, we may further increase our attention to outreach.

We don’t see other major issues (in the “cross-cutting between Open Philanthropy Project and traditional work” category) that need addressing in 2015.

Open Philanthropy Project: Progress in 2014 and plans for 2015

(updated on: ) | by Holden

This is the fourth post (of six) we’re planning to make focused on our self-evaluation and future plans.

We’re in the midst of finalizing detailed updates on Open Philanthropy Project progress and plans. This post gives a high-level summary, comparing our progress and stage of development with what we hoped for as of a year ago. In brief:

  • We made substantial progress on our main priorities: U.S. policy and global catastrophic risks. The precise nature of our goal (“commitments” to causes) shifted, but we have completed a substantial number of high-level cause investigations and decided on our working cause priorities. We are now shifting our focus from cause investigations to aiming for major grants and/or hires. Within the next six months, we hope to make at least one major grant and/or specialized hire in each of (a) U.S. policy and (b) global catastrophic risks; we consider this a “stretch goal” (substantial probability we will fail to hit it), and we plan another high-level check-in around 6 months from now.
  • We made less progress than hoped on other cause categories: scientific research funding and global health and development. We put substantial time into scientific research funding, but have found it to be probably the most complex and challenging of the broad categories. Our main goal for 2015 is to form clear priorities within scientific research funding, comparable to where we currently stand on U.S. policy and global catastrophic risks. This is a stretch goal. We don’t plan to work on global health and development this year for the Open Philanthropy Project.
  • We made some progress in separating the Open Philanthropy Project brand from the GiveWell brand, including a renaming (the Open Philanthropy Project was known as GiveWell Labs until last August). In the coming year, we plan to launch a more substantial website for the Open Philanthropy Project, continuing the process of separation.

U.S. policy and global catastrophic risks
We covered recent progress in these areas, and compared it to goals set last year, in previous posts (U.S. policy, global catastrophic risks). This section gives a summary of that progress; those who have read the previous two posts may wish to skip it.

Last year, we wrote:

…our top goal for 2014 is a stretch goal (substantial probability we will fail to hit it): making substantial commitments to causes within these two categories. We aren’t sure yet how many causes this will involve; it will depend partly on our ability to find suitable hires. We also haven’t fully formalized the notion of a “substantial commitment to cause X,” but it will likely involve having at least one staff member spending a substantial part of their time on cause X, planning to do so for multiple years, and being ready to commit $5-30 million per year in funding. Given this level of commitment, it is likely that we will not be able to commit to more than 1-3 causes for each broad category (“global catastrophic risks” and “US policy issues” are instances of “broad categories”) in the coming year. Sub-goals of this goal are:

* Completing enough shallow- and medium-depth investigations to feel that we’ve looked near-comprehensively at potential focus causes in these two categories, and writing up our reasons for narrowing the field to a smaller set of “contender causes.”
* Deeply investigating “contender causes” – possibly including some amount of preliminary grantmaking – and prioritizing these “contender causes” relative to each other (and discussing our reasons for such prioritization).
* Recruiting people to focus primarily or exclusively on finding giving opportunities within the causes we select.

We see this as an extremely challenging goal for the coming year, given our current status in these areas. There is no precision to estimating that one year is roughly sufficient, and the project of prioritizing causes in these categories could easily stretch into 2015. With that said, this prioritization is our top priority for 2014, and we think we have a chance to accomplish it. If we do so, we believe that GiveWell Labs [now Open Philanthropy Project] will become a much easier product to understand, discuss and critique, and we will reach the sort of crucial juncture for GiveWell Labs [now Open Philanthropy Project] that we reached for our traditional work around the end of 2009: having concrete recommendations that we can promote and defend, leading to much better engagement with and appeal to donors.

We have not delivered on this goal as initially envisioned. This is mostly because our thinking on how, and how much, to “commit” to causes has evolved. Rather than commit major time and funding up front to a small number of causes, we are going with a longer list of prioritized causes, and we’re looking for a good combination of “high-priority cause” with “strong specific giving and/or hiring opportunity.” The evolution of our thinking on this front is documented in several previous posts: Expert philanthropy vs. broad philanthropy, Thoughts on the Sandler Foundation, and our most recent update on our priorities for U.S. policy causes (similar reasoning applies to our work on global catastrophic risks).

With that said, we’ve done a large number of shallow- and medium-depth cause investigations, and as of the end of January 2015 (a little less than a month behind the schedule implied above), we were transferring the bulk of our energy from these sorts of investigations to seeking out hires and grants in the causes we’ve prioritized.

We haven’t yet made specialized hires, and we feel that the progress we had hoped for on making the Open Philanthropy Project “more concrete” has been partially but not fully realized.

Within the next six months, we hope to make at least one major grant and/or specialized hire in each of (a) U.S. policy and (b) global catastrophic risks; we consider this a “stretch goal” (substantial probability we will fail to hit it). We plan another high-level check-in around 6 months from now.

Scientific research funding and global health and development
Last year, we wrote:

We feel that we are at an earlier stage with two other broad categories of philanthropic causes: scientific research funding and foreign aid. In the case of scientific research funding, we have determined that scientific advisors are crucial, and we have recently recruited several such advisors and started working with them on a trial basis. In the case of foreign aid, despite our history of recommending charities that aid the developing world, we have not developed a strong understanding of how to evaluate a broad cause such as “malaria control” or infrastructure in sub-Saharan Africa from the perspective of flexible, large-scale philanthropy (as opposed to focusing in specifically on delivery of evidence-backed interventions).We hope that at the beginning of 2015, we will be able to say about these two areas what we currently say about global catastrophic risks and US policy: that we have a general sense of the landscape of causes and of how to investigate and evaluate causes, and can aim to make serious commitments to causes in these categories within a year. This is also an ambitious goal, especially in light of its being a secondary priority to the above goal.

We did not deliver on the above goal.

I put substantial time into working with a team of six junior scientific advisors on a couple of fronts:

  • Having general conversations about philanthropic opportunities around scientific research.
  • Investigating the hypothesis that diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis (which disproportionately affect the global poor) are underfunded, and therefore present strong philanthropic opportunities.

I found this work highly challenging. In many cases, I found that the scientists we most wanted to talk to were reluctant to speak at all and/or reluctant to be candid about strong funding opportunities. This contrasts with our experience investigating U.S. policy areas, where many of the people who are best positioned to answer our questions see educating the public as part of their job. In addition, we struggled to find the right way to approach the second investigation listed above: we weren’t able to find people who could give broad, cross-cutting summaries of what philanthropic opportunities might look like, and struggled to think of how to divide the question into smaller questions for optimal efficiency.

Looking at where we stand today, it seems to me that:

  • We are still struggling to identify the right division of labor between full-time employees and scientific advisors when investigating a question of interest. We recently transitioned from working with a team of six advisors on fairly broad questions to working more intensively with individual advisors on investigating opportunities around specific diseases. We expect our thinking on this point to evolve further.
  • I am well behind where I’d like to be in terms of having basic background knowledge about scientific research. Obviously, I will never be an expert in any particular scientific field, so I need to be thoughtful about what a realistic level of background knowledge is, but I would like to improve significantly more before stepping up our efforts to investigate specific causes within scientific research.
  • Between the above two points, we still aren’t yet at the point where we can be working on large numbers of shallow- and medium-depth investigations of scientific research causes.
  • All of the above pertains only to biomedical sciences. We haven’t even begun exploring other scientific fields, including social sciences, energy, and computer science and machine learning.

In light of this situation, we are planning to free up some capacity by postponing Open Philanthropy Project work on global health and development until we’ve made significantly more progress on exploring scientific research. We feel that GiveWell’s top charities represent outstanding giving opportunities for people whose main concern is global health and development – in fact, we are not highly confident that we will find better ones for this particular goal through Open Philanthropy Project. We see improving our understanding of scientific research as the more daunting and pressing goal.

Our main goal for 2015 is to form clear priorities within scientific research funding, comparable to where we currently stand on U.S. policy and global catastrophic risks. This is a stretch goal.

We’ll be writing more about the specifics of our findings and views on biomedical sciences in the coming weeks.

Other progress and plans for Open Philanthropy Project

  • We have recently been prioritizing investigation over public writeups, and our public content is running well behind our private investigations. We are experimenting with different processes for writing up completed investigations – in particular, trying to assign more of the work to more junior staff. If we could do this, it would make a major difference to our capacity, since senior staff already have a substantial challenge keeping up with all of our priority causes. By the end of 2015, we hope that our public content will be no further behind our private investigations than it is at the moment.
  • In 2014, we created the “Open Philanthropy Project” name – replacing GiveWell Labs – and created a preliminary website. In the coming year, we plan to launch a more substantial website for the Open Philanthropy Project, and to look further into the idea of creating a separate organization (which we see as highly likely to happen in the long run).
  • We continued work on our History of Philanthropy project; we put out the first public case study, completed two more that are not yet public, and funded a conference on History of Philanthropy at the Rockefeller Archive Center. We plan to continue work on case studies with our existing consultants, and take new opportunities that come up to make grants and/or bring on new consultants. However, we have no specific goals for the year on this front.
  • We are continuing to network with people at major foundations and people who may become major funders in the future. We do not have specific goals on this front for 2015.
  • We are in the process of considering two grants to major U.S. think tanks trying to build their presence in India and/or China. We feel that we will eventually find it important to be able to work in other countries, particularly countries as important to the future global economy as India and China. However, we expect doing so to be extremely challenging, due largely to the difficulty of forming good relationships and having background context. We see these grants as a small step that will better position us to learn, over time, about the challenges of working overseas. This is not a major priority for 2015.

Open Philanthropy Project update: Global catastrophic risks

(updated on: ) | by Holden

This post lays out our progress, since last year, on identifying potential focus areas for our work on global catastrophic risks.

Summary
Note: this section is similar to the introduction of our previous post on U.S. policy. The overall approach of our work has evolved similarly in the two areas.

Last year, we set a “stretch goal” for the Open Philanthropy Project:

There are two types of causes – global catastrophic risks and US policy issues – that we now feel generally familiar with (particularly with the methods of investigation). We also believe it is important for us to pick some causes for serious commitments (multiple years, substantial funding) as soon as feasible, so that we can start to get experienced with the process of building cause-specific capacity and finding substantial numbers of giving opportunities. As such, our top goal for 2014 is a stretch goal (substantial probability we will fail to hit it): making substantial commitments to causes within these two categories. We aren’t sure yet how many causes this will involve; it will depend partly on our ability to find suitable hires. We also haven’t fully formalized the notion of a “substantial commitment to cause X,” but it will likely involve having at least one staff member spending a substantial part of their time on cause X, planning to do so for multiple years, and being ready to commit $5-30 million per year in funding.

Since then:

  • Our thinking on how, and how much, to “commit” to causes has evolved. Rather than commit major time and funding up front to a small number of causes, we are going with a longer list of prioritized causes, and we’re looking for a good combination of “high-priority cause” with “strong specific giving and/or hiring opportunity.”
  • With that said, we feel that we’ve fulfilled the spirit of the above goal, about a month behind the date we had set. We’ve done a large number of shallow- and medium-depth cause investigations, and we’re now transferring the bulk of our energy from these sorts of investigations to seeking out hires and grants in the causes we’ve prioritized.
  • Our new goal is to be in the late stages of making at least one “big bet” – a major grant ($5+ million) or full-time hire – in the next six months. We think there is a moderate likelihood that we will hit this goal; if we do not, we will narrow our focus to a smaller number of causes in order to raise our odds.
  • Our highest priority is to make a full-time hire for working on biosecurity. As a second priority, we are spending significant time on various aspects of geoengineering, geomagnetic storms, risks from artificial intelligence, and some issues that cut across different global catastrophic risks. A more extensive summary of our priorities and reasoning is available as a Google sheet.
  • We have recently been prioritizing investigation over public writeups, and there are many shallow- and medium-depth investigations we have completed but not written up. We are experimenting with different processes for writing up completed investigations – in particular, trying to assign more of the work to more junior staff – so our public writeups could remain behind our private investigations for much of the next few months.

Below, we go into more detail on:

Progress since our June update
Biosecurity. We put significantly more work into understanding the fairly large and complex biosecurity space, which includes efforts to prevent or mitigate the harm from natural pandemics, accidental release of dangerous natural pathogens, currently existing biological weapons, and accidental or purposeful release of synthetic pathogens in the future. We believe there are significant philanthropic opportunities here. We are currently strongly considering one grant and may consider others, though we believe this space is complex enough that the best way to approach it would be with specialized staff.

Artificial intelligence. We began an investigation of risks from potential unintended consequences of advances in artificial intelligence. We hoped to hear the perspectives of mainstream computer scientists, artificial intelligence experts, and machine learning experts regarding arguments like those advanced in the recent book Superintelligence. We temporarily paused this investigation on learning that the Future of Life Institute was planning a conference on this topic; Howie Lempel and Jacob Steinhardt attended the conference on our behalf. We see the conference as a major update:

  • An open letter following the conference makes it fairly clear, to us, that a wide variety of people with relevant expertise see artificial intelligence as a technology whose potential for great benefits may come along with real risks on which meaningful preparatory research can and should be done.
  • This was followed by a $10 million commitment from Elon Musk to fund such research.
  • We see this cause as highly important and worthy of investment. It remains unclear to us how to think about its “crowdedness,” and we plan to coordinate closely with the Future of Life Institute to follow what gets funded and what gaps remain.

Geoengineering. We continued to investigate the cause of governance of and research into geoengineering, and are currently strongly considering a grant in this space.

Geomagnetic storms. We began an investigation (by consultant David Roodman, who previously investigated labor mobility and the mortality-fertility connection) into the conflicting claims we’ve seen about the threat posed by geomagnetic storms. This investigation is still in progress. Depending on its outcome, we may become interested in funding research into electrical grid robustness.

Other risks. We looked further into philanthropic possibilities for reducing risks from nuclear weapons, completed a shallow investigation on risks from atomically precise manufacturing, and did a small amount of investigation on general food security (a cross-cutting issue, since several different global catastrophic risks could disrupt global agriculture).

We have not yet made the results of any of the above investigations public, though we plan to. As mentioned early in this post, we have been prioritizing investigation over public writeups, and we are experimenting with different processes for writing up completed investigations – in particular, trying to assign more of the work to more junior staff.

As with U.S. policy, we have noted significant variation in the extent to which different issues are suitable for specialized staff. We feel that biosecurity would be best handled by specialized staff. The other areas we’re considering – with the possible exception of geoengineering – seem better suited to a “broad” model in which we scan multiple areas at once, looking for the most outstanding grant opportunities.

Plans
While there are more cause investigations we could do, at this point we think it’s appropriate to shift our priorities in the direction of granting out significant funds in the causes we’ve already identified as promising. At the same time, we’re trying to give ourselves the flexibility to look across multiple possible causes, and only make a “big bet” (a full-time hire or major grant) where we feel the opportunity is outstanding. As such, we’ve created a relatively long prioritized list of causes, with goals for each, and our six-month goal is to be in the late stages of making a “big bet” in at least one area. We may continue to make smaller grants, with relatively light investigation, when we see reasonably strong opportunities, but this is not our main goal.

We’ve ranked biosecurity as our top priority, for the following reasons.

Suitability for a full-time hire. Biosecurity stands out along several dimensions that make it an appealing but also particularly complex target for philanthropy:

  • Governments spend a large amount on biosecurity preparations but many opportunities to improve preparedness remain and there is little philanthropic spending in the field. This suggests an opportunity for philanthropy to leverage public money but also increases the complexity of the cause.
  • Some interventions may increase our preparedness for both near-term risks from natural pandemics and larger, longer-term risks related to the misuse or abuse of emerging synthetic biology technology. Efforts to reduce long-run risks may be more sustainable if they simultaneously produce verifiably short-run benefits but also risk losing sight of their long-run mission. Comparing the expected impact of interventions focused on different time horizons also presents a challenge and is one reason that hiring a specialist may be particularly valuable.
  • Biosecurity presents opportunities to intervene in many venues. Preparations include global, regional, national, and local components and a biosecurity strategy may target or fund governments, intergovernmental organizations, NGOs, for-profits, or other entities.

Overall, we feel biosecurity is the best-suited (of the causes we have ranked relatively highly) to a specialized hire, and hiring is a top priority of ours.

Importance, tractability, crowdedness. We see this area as the most threatening risk on the list, with the possible exception of artificial intelligence, in terms of probability of a massive global disruption to civilization, and we are fairly convinced that there are real opportunities to improve preparedness.

We find it difficult to predict whether the additional attention brought to the cause by the Ebola outbreak in West Africa will lead to major changes in available funding. We plan to monitor this situation and expect the most important effects to be on the relative crowdedness of different interventions within the cause. Our current view is that it would be a surprise if most of the promising opportunities to increase preparation were funded by other actors in the near future.

Our next few priorities are a set of risks that we see as (a) posing substantial threats of massive global disruptions to civilization in the next century; (b) presenting a strong possibility of useful, not-already-funded preparatory work in the near future; (c) not being a good fit for extremely intensive or full-time investigation at this time, either because we have some key open questions remaining or because we aren’t aware of a large enough space of giving opportunities. Specifically:

  • We believe geoengineering research and governance is a promising philanthropic space. Because it is a relatively thin space (not many researchers or organizations currently devoted to it), a specialized hire in this area may need to very actively field-build and generate interest from potential grantees who are not currently seeking (additional) funding to work on geoengineering; we remain uncertain of how wise or efficient such a strategy would be at this time. We might make a specialized hire if we found an outstanding fit, but might also simply continue to monitor the space and capitalize on giving opportunities that arise.
  • We believe that research on risks of unintended consequences from the development of artificial intelligence is a promising philanthropic space. Here again, the field is relatively thin; in addition, we are unsure what sorts of giving opportunities will remain in the wake of Elon Musk’s $10 million commitment. We are monitoring this space and communicating closely with the Future of Life Institute.
  • We plan to finish our investigation of risks from geomagnetic storms, after which point we might pursue the idea of funding research on electrical grid robustness. We don’t think we would fund other work in this area before learning more about the amount of damage that could be done by a severe storm.
  • Now that we have formed a broad view of the most threatening global catastrophic risks, we are interested in giving opportunities that could “cut across risks,” addressing multiple risks at once – for example, improving food security (which we have looked into a bit; we have preliminarily have found a lack of consensus on promising projects), forecasting future risks, researching ways to increase society’s general resilience to shocks, or improving general mechanisms for governance of emerging technologies. We are currently assessing some such opportunities and will continue to be open to more.

Below these priorities, we list risks where (a) a massive global disruption to civilization is highly unlikely to occur in the next century; or (b) we have found less useful preparatory work that is not already being done.

An additional goal for the next several months is to write up the more recent work we’ve done, most of which is not yet public.

Public summary of our global catastrophic risk priorities