This article has been extremely valuable to me as a college student with years of learning (not all during college) ahead of me. With your argument and aims presented about this kind of altruism, it seems that the Good Ventures and Give Well are trying to align themselves with the most effective ways to contribute. This argument is definitely a hot topic! I think it's good to have philanthropy as the goal and need as the catalyst. I wish you and Give Well more success in the future.

Posted by Aneisha Ellis on 2014-03-01 07:33:57

Yes, thanks. I look forward to seeing more as your work progresses.

Posted by Nick Beckstead on 2013-10-02 05:50:54

Hi Nick — That’s a great question. We often wish we knew more about the grants other foundations have chosen not to make and why. At this point, however, we don’t have much to share in the way of useful information about grants we’ve chosen not to make. We don’t accept or solicit applications from charities, so there’s no list of applications we considered and rejected. Rather, we’re focused on identifying focus areas, in partnership with GiveWell. (From here on when I say “we” I’m referring to Good Ventures and GiveWell.) As part of this research, we learn about many organizations and interventions, but we rarely consider making a grant except in cases where an opportunity is especially promising (in terms of impact and/or learning) and timely. At this stage, we’re asking “Who are the organizations working in field X?” rather than “Which organizations working in field X should we fund?” Soon, we’ll start making more “learning grants” in areas we consider especially promising. (A forthcoming post on the GiveWell Blog will discuss this strategy in more detail.) But even then, we won’t be systematically considering all of the groups we could fund. Rather, we’ll be making grants opportunistically to people and organizations we come across who are particularly interesting and from whom we think we could learn. Once we select focus areas, I expect we’ll do more systematic scans of organizations and strategies and share what we can about why we’re choosing some over others. At that time, we’ll also be in a better position to discuss why we’re choosing certain focus areas over others. In the meantime, http://www.givewell.org/shallo... is a good place to see the growing list of areas we’ve considered and explored at a shallow level of depth. There’s one part of our research where we have considered grants that we’ve decided not to make: co-funding with other foundations. Our plan with co-funding is to approach other funders whose work we find interesting and whose interests sufficiently overlap with ours (e.g. major foundations working in global health and/or development) and ask about the possibility of co-funding projects with them in order to learn. When we have co-funded a project (e.g. with the Gates Foundation, as you point out) we’ve described the process that led to the grant, including listing the projects we decided not to co-fund. We’re planning to write about another such co-funding experience soon. In other cases, we haven’t published the projects suggested to us by other funders, often because we don't have permission to share the information. We’re still thinking about how to share what we’ve learned from co-funding overall without divulging information that we don’t have permission to share. I hope that sheds some light.

Posted by Cari Tuna on 2013-10-02 01:04:12

Hi Cari, I worked at GiveWell in the summer of 2012 and have been closely following GiveWell's work since 2008. I have seen everything that you've linked to in the past. I think that Good Ventures does an outstanding job of sharing information about its selection process and criteria. I'm trying to explain one aspect of your work that I understand least as someone who has been following the process closely. The thing that seems to be missing for me is a picture of the grants you considered making but didn't make, and how the grants you did make are different from those grants. Perhaps the closest thing I've seen to what would help me would be GiveWell's listing here http://www.givewell.org/charit.... GiveWell gave a lot of information about charities it didn't recommend, and perhaps that was overkill. But I do see a lot of value in even just having a list of grants or grant areas (I'm struggling to find the right word or phrase) that were considered but not made. Edited to add: Here's an analogy that I think is potentially illuminating. Imagine a VC that was trying to be very transparent about its selection process, which recorded notes from conversations with a lot of VCs, said what they were looking for, published extensive information about the start-ups they funded, and carefully explained how the start-ups they funded were strong in terms of their criteria. If I was following this VC's work and wanted to understand it better, I might be curious to know more about the start-ups they didn't fund. Maybe I could get a list of the start-ups that came very close to being funded but didn't make it. Or maybe I could see explicit comparisons between the start-ups that made it and the ones that didn't, with explanations about how the funded start-ups were different in terms of the criteria. Anyway, I hope this helps you see where I'm coming from.

Posted by Nick Beckstead on 2013-09-25 07:07:14

Hi Nick — A lot of detail about our selection process has been published, and we plan to publish more as we continue developing it. As I mentioned above, our primary selection process currently involves researching potential program areas and making grants to help us learn — about giving opportunities in those areas and how to be an effective donor generally — in partnership with GiveWell. GiveWell refers to this research as “GiveWell Labs.” What we’re learning is being published, mostly on GiveWell’s website. http://blog.givewell.org/categ... is a good place to read about the details of our research process as we develop it, and http://www.givewell.org/shallo... is a good place to read about the results of our issue-specific investigations. For an even more granular look at our process, you can read notes from the conversations we’re having at http://www.goodventures.org/re... and http://givewell.org/conversati.... (Some conversations are published on both sites.) We hope that people debate the merits of our process; that helps us refine it. We also hope they debate which issue areas seem most promising. Roughly speaking, we define promising as important, tractable and neglected; these criteria also are worth debating. Here also are some examples of past grants we made where the rationale was spelled out in detail: PSI Myanmar

- Rationale: http://www.goodventures.org/re...

- Overview of the project: http://www.givewell.org/PSI-My...

- April 2013 update: http://www.givewell.org/PSI-My... Center for Global Development

- http://blog.givewell.org/2013/...

- http://www.givewell.org/Millio... Cochrane Collaboration

- http://blog.givewell.org/2012/... GiveWell-recommended charities

- http://www.goodventures.org/re...

- http://www.goodventures.org/re...

- http://blog.givewell.org/2011/... Note that we publish more details about some grants than others; it varies relative to how large the grants are and how central they are to our learning process. Thanks for the question.

Posted by Cari Tuna on 2013-09-24 20:39:55

Cari, I agree with you and GiveWell on the merits of quantification. I also think there is a bigger picture point in Ozzie's comment that you may agree with regardless of your views about the merits of quantification. One thing I think people are getting at when they make requests for quantification is some sense of how you think the opportunities you've chosen (whether primarily for learning or primarily to have a more direct impact) compare with other opportunities you considered or might have considered, and why you think what you think. Giving a cost-effectiveness estimate for everything you spend money on would give people a sense of how you think everything compares, and cost-effectiveness estimates often break down into different assumptions which people can debate. So cost-effectiveness estimates can help others see how you're comparing options and why you're comparing them the way you are. So one way to see these requests is as a request for more details about your selection process. Ozzie's comment made me look more closely at some of your grants and it made me very curious what other grants you might have considered, and why you chose the ones you did. There's obviously a greater burden the more you say about this type of stuff. But I do think others might be able to learn more if they had more of a perspective on why you chose to make the grants you did rather than making other grants. One way you might move more in this direction would be to list many grants you considered making, saying how you think they compare along different dimensions (transparency of the organizations you're giving to, how important you think the cause is, how much evidence there is behind the intervention, how much upside potential you think there is, how good you think the organization is, etc.; or what ever factors you use), and saying how that led you to final decisions. I would find this especially interesting for your grants in policy advocacy. Anyway, you may be too busy to justify answering this kind of question, but I thought it might be worthwhile to explain one factor which may be behind the EA community's interest in cost-effectiveness estimates.

Posted by Nick Beckstead on 2013-09-20 19:28:47

Ozzie – Our current strategy for giving as effectively as possible is to research a wide variety of potential focus areas and choose based on where we think we’ll have the most impact. We’re partnering with GiveWell on this research, and what we're learning is being published, mostly on GiveWell's website at e.g. http://blog.givewell.org/categ... and http://www.givewell.org/shallo.... We think calculating expected value can be a useful exercise, depending on the intervention, but we tend not to put much weight on such calculations because we don’t find them to be robust enough in most cases. That is particularly true for more “upstream” interventions such as policy advocacy or scientific research. GiveWell has written extensively on this topic; you might find the following posts interesting:

http://blog.givewell.org/2013/...

http://blog.givewell.org/2011/...

http://blog.givewell.org/2011/... We haven’t analyzed whether it would be better to donate what we’re currently spending on Good Ventures operations to e.g. the Against Malaria Foundation or another philanthropy (though we have made large grants to AMF, and we have considered whether it would be more cost-effective to donate to another philanthropy instead of starting our own). But it’s our strong intuition that doing so would be less effective than operating Good Ventures. We hope and expect our research to turn up more promising giving (and learning) opportunities in the future, for us and other donors. I don’t believe it’s worth diverting time and energy from that research to formalize this intuition (particularly since such an analysis is unlikely to be robust). I don’t think that makes us less “intense” as effective altruists. I think it means we’re less convinced by the merits of quantification than some others in the effective altruist community. It’s a good debate to be having.

Posted by Cari Tuna on 2013-09-20 18:09:47