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EA - GWWC's evaluations of evaluators by Sjir Hoeijmakers
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: GWWC's evaluations of evaluators, published by Sjir Hoeijmakers on November 22, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.The Giving What We Can research team is excited to share the results of our first round of evaluations of charity evaluators and grantmakers! After announcing our plans for a new research directionlast year, we have now completed five[1] evaluations that will inform our donation recommendations for this giving season. There are substantiallimitations to these evaluations, but we nevertheless think that this is a significant improvement on the status quo, in which there were no independent evaluations of evaluators' work. We plan to continue to evaluate evaluators, extending the list beyond the five we've covered so far, improving our methodology, and regularly renewing our existing evaluations.In this post, we share the key takeaways from each of these evaluations, and link to the full reports. Ourwebsite will be updated to reflect the new fund and charity recommendations that came out of these evaluations (alongside many other updates) on Monday, the 27th. We are sharing these reports in advance of our website update so those interested have time to read them and can ask questions before our AMA next Monday and Tuesday. We're also sharing some context aboutwhy and how we evaluate evaluators, which will be included in our Monday website update as well.One other exciting (and related) announcement: we'll be launching our new GWWC cause area funds on Monday! These funds (which you'll see referenced in the reports) will make grants based on our latest evaluations of evaluators, advised by the evaluators we end up working with.[2] We are launching them to provide a strong and easy default donation option for donors, and one that will stay up-to-date over time (i.e., donors can set up a recurring donation to these funds knowing that it will always be allocated based on GWWC's latest research).donation platform as well.We look forward to your questions and comments, and in particular to engaging with you in our AMA! (Please note that we may not be able to reply to many comments until then, as we are finalising the website updates and some of us will be on leave.)Global health and wellbeingGiveWell (GW)Based on our evaluation, we've decided to continue to rely on GW's charity recommendations and to ask GW to advise our new GWWC Global Health and Wellbeing Fund.Some takeaways that inform this decision include:GW's overall processes for charity recommendations and grantmaking are generally very strong, reflecting a lot of best practices in finding and funding the most cost-effective opportunities.GW's cost-effectiveness analyses stood up to our quality checks. We thought its work was remarkably evenhanded (we never got the impression that the evaluations were exaggerated), and we generally found only minor issues in the substance of its reasoning, though we did find issues with how well this reasoning was presented and explained.We found it noteworthy how much subjective judgement plays a role in its work, especially with how GW compares different outcomes (like saving and improving lives), and also in some key parameters in its cost-effectiveness analyses supporting deworming. We think reasonable people could come to different conclusions than GW does in some cases, but we think GW's approach is sufficiently well justified overall for our purposes.For more, please see theevaluation report.Happier Lives Institute (HLI)We stopped this evaluation short of finishing it, because we thought the costs of finalising it outweighed the potential benefits at this stage.For more on this decision and on what we did learn about HLI, please see theevaluation report.Animal welfareEA Funds' Animal Welfare Fund (AWF)Based on our evaluation, we've decide...
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