Peter and Holden, thanks for sharing your feedback. I’ll provide some additional thoughts to address your comments.

Peter, regarding your comments about possibly over-diversifying, that is an issue I considered. My giving this year is more spread out than in the past several years. I wasn’t trying to optimize on a single dimension of giving (e.g. giving to learn, maximizing expected immediate impact, etc), but to balance multiple factors. When weighing everything, I was unable to come up with one charity that I viewed as clearly standing out above the others.

Peter, regarding UNICEF, over the past few decades, they have been leaders in a substantial amount of the most high-impact interventions in global health, including being a partner-of-choice for many very sophisticated funders helping to implement these programs. One way of thinking about large, multi-project organizations is that the additional money you give them will allow them to expand their lowest priority programs. That is a reasonable view, but it also doesn't account for several benefits of supporting large organizations. These benefits include: ·
1. Enabling UNICEF to maintain its organizational infrastructure, which helps to successfully implement the high-priority projects that are funded with restricted grants from other donors. That is, my donation may increase the effectiveness of all of their other programs.

2. Helping UNICEF help other charities be more effective. As an example, UNICEF hosts an annual meeting for suppliers of mosquito nets so they can learn from each other and improve the entire sector (http://www.unicef.org/supply/index_39977.html). Another example is documentation of how they were promoting deworming to others in international development over a decade ago (http://www.unicef.org/eapro/Prevention_of_intestinal_worm_infections.pdf and http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~dludden/WaterborneDisease2.pdf).

3. Allowing the organization with boots on the ground to decide which programs get funding. I understand that there’s a lot of skepticism about large organizations in international development because so many have focused on ineffective programs, but UNICEF’s track record suggests that is less of an issue for them. There may be other large, multi-program charities that share this trait; I imagine that Oxfam does, given that I've heard it described as one of Peter Singer’s favorite charities. It is not possible to track something like X additional vaccines for the $Y dollars I give UNICEF, but I don’t think that means the benefits to giving to it are small. Holden, thanks for clarifying GiveWell’s views about the “upside” component of your recommendations. You discuss the upside in terms of providing transparency, more information about the intervention, and incentives. I am comfortable with these reasons in theory, which is among the reasons SCI didn't make my list., but have trouble when these are applied to a charity that is not as cost-effective as others (my view of GiveDirectly). The gap between our views may be closed by your statement that you believe there is not a huge difference in cost-effectiveness between GiveDirectly and the other top charities.

We appreciate the thoughtful comments by Eric Friedman. At the same time, we feel that they misrepresent GiveWell's criteria and emphasis, and we feel it is important to clarify matters.

This post portrays GiveWell as placing strong weight on strength of evidence and as being highly averse to taking risks and chasing "upside," i.e., potential for greater impact. I don't think that's accurate, but I do think the kind of "upside" we're looking for is different from the kind Eric is looking for.

The "upside" Eric is seeking seems to be in the form of funding interventions with higher direct impact per dollar. It's worth noting that the variance here - within the range of interventions under consideration - is not particularly large. We estimate that deworming does 2-3x more direct good per dollar spent than cash transfers; given the low robustness of the calculation, I don't think it's straightforward to say which actually has higher expected direct good accomplished per dollar outright. Bednets appear have similar cost-effectiveness to deworming and stronger evidence, and my sense is that the best interventions carried out by UNICEF are in the same ballpark as well. The gains here would be around a factor of 3 if one believed our estimates are highly robust. I believe that the right number to use when accounting for low robustness is below a factor of 3, though how much below is a matter for debate.

The "upside" we're seeking, by contrast, is in the form of creating public goods and incentives that lead to better giving over time. Transparency is important because it allows more accurate cost-effectiveness analysis, assessment of room for more funding, and general learning that makes us better than evaluations. Generation of new evidence (something we believe GiveDirectly is more likely to provide than Evidence Action) is important for the same reasons. Rewarding charities that communicate clearly about their work and facilitate more learning is also important. I believe our emphasis on this sort of "upside" rather than on maximal (non-robustly) estimated cost-effectiveness has already led us to a much better position from which to be making informed giving decisions. I expect the vast majority of the good we and our donors do to lie well in the future, and so prioritizing factors relevant to learning and quality of information seems appropriate when the sacrifices in estimated-direct-impact terms are relatively small.

Another sort of "upside" we are interested in is that of scaling relatively small but high-potential organizations, especially innovative ones.

The contrast is particularly apparent in the case of GiveDirectly (strongly recommended by GiveWell, not supported by Eric) and UNICEF (supported by Eric, not recommended by GiveWell). Over the last year, GiveDirectly has attracted major attention in the media and in the development community. This attention may lead to dramatic rethinking of what aid should look like and how it should be evaluated. GiveDirectly is also pioneering unusual methods of aid delivery (mobile money) and evaluation/data collection (for example, using Google Earth to verify recipient eligibility). GiveDirectly has run an RCT of its own program and plans further experiments on both operational and programmatic components of cash transfers, which will produce new public goods. There are a lot of questions about GiveDirectly's future; we expect to follow along with it, learn a lot, and share our learning publicly. By contrast, it is probably not possible to learn much from following along with the impact of one's donations to UNICEF (it would not be possible even if GiveWell were to devote significant capacity to trying to do so), and my sense is that UNICEF's contribution to global public goods and rethinking aid is dramatically lower than GiveDirectly's when taking budget size into account. (Based on budget size and place in the aid community alone, it seems unlikely on its face that an $X donation to UNICEF has higher upside than an $X donation to GiveDirectly.) With all of this in mind, it doesn't strike me as correct to say that the case for GiveDirectly over UNICEF is all about evidence and confidence, or to say that UNICEF has greater upside.

The contrast between GiveDirectly and Evidence Action is also an important one to note. Evidence Action is affiliated with IPA, but it does not itself carry out rigorous studies. While I believe Evidence Action is an excellent organization and strongly support donations to it, I don't believe that donations to Evidence Action will lead to much more public knowledge about the effectiveness of chlorine dispensers or deworming, in the way that donations to GiveDirectly will lead to much more public knowledge about the impact of cash transfers.

I respect Eric's preference for high estimated cost-effectiveness over strong evidence; this is a judgment call that I disagree with but am not confident about. However, I think it is incorrect to say that GiveWell is neglecting upside entirely in its recommendations. I see GiveDirectly as the most innovative and high-upside of the charities discussed in this post.

I appreciate you taking the time to write up about your donations and I definitely appreciate you thinking hard about where your donations go, as well as the fact that you're committing a lot of money to good causes. However, I feel like some of the logic behind your choices are a bit inconsistent.

First, I'm not clear on why you're splitting your donation among many different organizations. I think there are some reasons one would want to have diversification, but some of your picks seem clearly better than others, and it's best to focus specifically on the highest-impact pick. If you're looking to maximize expected immediate impact, it looks like based on your views you should go all-in on SCI or Deworm the World. If you're looking to maximize learning, it looks like you should go all-in on either GiveWell (unrestricted) or Dispensers for Safe Water, depending on whether you trust GiveWell or IPA more. I don't know why you would diversify between both.

Second, I'm not clear on what benefit there is to donating to UNICEF. The benefits of experience working in the developing world is important, but IPA also has this. Also, just because UNICEF rolls out high-impact programs that GiveWell can't find more room for more funding for doesn't mean UNICEF itself has more room for more funding in those areas. I suspect that since UNICEF is so well funded, marginal increases in funding will not fund nearly as cost-effective activities.