Effective altruism is built on the simple but unsettling idea that living a fully ethical life involves doing the most good one can. In this course you will examine this idea's philosophical underpinnings; meet remarkable people who have restructured their lives in accordance with it; and think about how effective altruism can be put into practice in your own life.
GiveWell's Recommended Charities
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Из курса от партнера Princeton University
Effective Altruism
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What is the Best Cause?
How do you get the most value for your charitable dollars? How can you compare different causes to each other, and how do you compare different charities to each other? The guest in this week is Elie Hassenfeld from GiveWell, an organization that tries to find the answers to these questions.
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Peter SingerIra W. Decamp Professor of Bioethics
University Center for Human Values
Elie it's clear when people go to your website, firstly,
that you've got this pie chart that shows the number of charities reviewed,
and a very thin slice of pie, the number of charities that you recommend.
So, some people would regard this as saying that
most of the charities aren't doing any good, there's only a tiny segment of
the charities that you're prepared to recommend.
Are the rest really useless, or tell us what, what, how people should read that.
>> It's a really good question.
GiveWell is not trying to rate every single charity,
and we certainly do not believe that the charities who don't receive
a recommendation of ours are, are useless, they're having, or
that they might be having no impact or, or negative impact.
Instead, what GiveWell is aiming to do is to find the best
giving opportunities we can, subject to the criteria that we use.
And there are many organizations who could be doing a great deal of high quality,
impactful work that we don't look at because they fall outside the scope
of what we do.
The, the way I would describe what GiveWell is looking for are charities that
have a demonstrable track record working on programs with a strong evidence base.
Such that donors who come to our website can have high confidence that the programs
that we recommend get signif, give them significant value for their donations.
And many other organizations could be doing an immense amount of good work, but
don't meet those criteria, and evaluating them as effective,
would require a donor, if we were to do that, would require a donor to rely
significantly more on judgement calls of ours, value judgements that we make.
And so we've decided to focus on the types of groups where we think it's,
will be easier for donors to rely on our judgement and
check how we arrived at those judgements.
While also being, I'm, I'm,
I'm confident some of the, the best ways to help people a, a, around the world.
>> So when you look then at the, the ones you do recommend,
they tend to be very specialized in particular things.
So the, the large organizations, the household names in this field,
the Save The Children, CARE, Oxfam, UNICEF, none of them get recommended.
Is that just because it's too difficult to rate them?
What are your, what are you saying about them?
>> I, I think to some extent there, there significantly more difficult to recommend
than the narrower organizations that we have recommended in the past.
And so, it's certainly a group like Oxfam or Save the Children, World Vision,
UNICEF, it would be challenging, extremely challenging for us to look
at that and, and recommend all of their activities, because they do so much.
One of the challenges that we face would come down to transparency.
How much is this organization able to share, and
is it enough to allow us to really understand
all of the activities they undertake and the impact that those activities have?
And that's a level of understanding we're able to get to with
the organizations that we recommend now.
And it's a level of understanding I, I think would be quite challenging to get to
with those organizations, even if they were in a position where they were
willing and able to share the detailed information about everything that they do.
>> So, it's not necessarily their fault that they can't get
evaluated, do you think?
I mean, even if they did have a general ethos of transparency, it would actually
be difficult for them to be sufficiently transparent for you to rate them.
Is that what you're saying?
>> I, I think it would be, I think it would be difficult.
That said, if, if one of these large organizations came to us and
said, we're going to share everything that we have with you,
and we want to open up to GiveWell in the same way that our recommenda,
recommended charities have so far, that's something that we would be excited about.
And it might take us a little time to be able to go through it,
all the information, and prioritize the investigation, but
we would certainly be excited to do it.
>> Yeah, okay, so, I notice another type of charity
that often appeals to donors that you, I don't think you're recommending any of,
are ones that are performing some kind of surgery.
So, for example there are organizations that remove cataracts in
people who are blind because of cataracts or prevent people developing trachoma,
which is the most common form of blindness in developing countries.
And there are organizations that repair obstetric fistulas,
which is a, a devastating condition that, women who give birth,
often young women whose bodies are not fully mature and well developed have,
which, which then essentially ruins their life for the rest of their life.
They become a kind of social outcast because their feces or
urine trickle through the vagina and they can't really keep clean or smell okay.
Those sound like charities that are going to be both very worthwhile and
not that difficult to assess.
I mean, they all, they're prepared to put figures out there.
Are you just not convinced of the figures, or
why don't they figure in, in your recommendations?
>> One of the, one of the criteria that we look,
that we rely most on is, is the question that we call room for more funding.
And what they focuses on is not only how a charity has used funds in the past,
in what it has accomplished, but how it will use additional funding
beyond what it already has and what that will lead to for the organization.
And so for surgical organizations, the question of room for
more funding is particularly salient.
Because in some cases, so in the case of a charity that distributes bed nets,
they're able to take in additional money and buy additional bed nets directly.
But in the case of a surgical program, while it is, it is certainly possible that
additional funds would buy additional surgical supplies,
it, or other capacity, it's harder to ha, see
the direct connection between funding and additional surgeries if the bottleneck,
or the obstacle to additional surgeries taking place, was the lack of surgeons.
Because someone becoming a surgeon takes a very long time.
So, we, we have looked relatively superficially,
I would say, at surgery in the past, and it, it's a,
it is an area that we hope to come back to in the future.
But one that we have not looked at deeply in the last few years,
because we think that investigating this question of how surgical charities
would utilize additional funding would be particularly complicated to, to assess.
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