To be clear, I think my post could apply to your review, as my post reflects a general concern that when doing charity evaluations people often don't have sufficient context to know if they're accurately assessing cost effectiveness or general purpose. But I haven't followed Sinergia closely so I have no idea the extent to which it is in fact applicable to Sinergia -- I'd need to be an insider to know that. 

So what I meant when I said Vetted Causes' review could be an example of this pattern is that it appears you are doing reviews of strategies and organizations without being either extremely experienced at that strategy or extremely familiar with the organization's potentially private intentions. I have no idea if in fact Sinergia or the other organizations you have reviewed have private intentions that are different from their publicly stated goals -- I'm raising that as a possibility for any charity, as a factor that makes evaluating strategy difficult. Of course, if you in fact have an enormous amount of campaigning experience and access to Sinergia's private strategy documents, please do correct my misapprehension!

While I think you're last question is reasonable due to the direction of the conversation, I'm nevertheless not going to answer it, because it takes us off the topic of this post and into criticism/discussion of the content of your review in particular (as opposed to the general principle I am trying to focus on with this post: that sometimes organizations have non-publicly shareable strategies, and that makes accurately evaluating them challenging or impossible). 

Yeah that's a good point; maybe cause level assessments are much easier to do in light of this. 

That said, it doesn't really help donors decide where to give. In my personal case, I give in my area of greatest expertise -- I'm pretty sure I do have enough context to assess which organizations are effective, because I know the decision makers, etc. But I don't know how I'd advise other people who aren't in that position.

In the case of campaigns, do you think you can look at campaigns after they are won as evidence of past success being a sign of future success? Or are specific campaigners more useful to watch than organizations? I'm not in that world at all, but maybe some kinds of broad guidelines could be shared for donors interested in supporting the most effective campaigns... 

I suspect there are other cause areas where that wouldn't be helpful though, because even pointing out how to assess effectiveness would be too revealing. I suppose organizations taking that approach just wouldn't really be supportable by folks committed to only supporting organizations with validated effectiveness. 

Sorry if it came across like this post was intended to be feedback for you specifically -- your post was just one of the most recent examples that came to mind of charity evaluation being done publicly. I meant to find more examples but decided doing so would lead me to procrastinate on posting. I have no idea if anything I'm saying here applies in the case of Sinergia. 

If you think it is always unacceptable to provide false information to the public, even if that's a part of an organization's theory of change, I do disagree. Using the example of corporate campaigns the commenter above shared, if a nonprofit was trying to target a specific company to change their welfare standards, communicating at least slightly inaccurate information to the public might in some cases be extremely effective (I have no idea if this is true or not, I'm not a campaigner -- I just share it to illustrate my point). 

In the context of not-otherwise-strategic self-promotion, it was 100% certain that shared information was false and solely put forward on the website because they wanted to drum up donations and for no reason of strategy, I wouldn't think that was good. Although I also presume that sort of thing is relatively common (depending on the scale of the falsehood) and not necessarily correlated one way or the other with effectiveness. 

But given that I don't actually know what Sinergia's full strategy is, and the fact that Sinergia has several types of programs where I could easily imagine there being value in certain kinds of false statements, I'd need to do a lot more research to come to even a low-confidence opinion. And even then, I'd still want to be conscious of the possibility that (1) I'm not an insider to Sinergia, so there could be relevant info I don't have access to or they can't share and (2) I'm not an insider on farmed animal welfare in general, so there could be broad strategic considerations I don't understand. 

What would that mean for my actions? IDK! I'm not a charity evaluator. But for me personally that consciousness would widen the error bars on my opinion of Sinergia, certainly. I think charity evaluation is extremely difficult, for reasons like this.

If someone has already called a representative about this, is it effective to keep calling? Or do they sort of count calls by individual and it doesn't matter if you repeat? 

On what basis can a comparison of life importance be made?

You might be interested in this series of posts by Rethink Priorities about moral weights, which targets precisely the question of how different kinds of lives can be weighed against each other. Many utilitarians (which many people in EA are) believe that lives can be compared like this. 

Second point within this comment I'm interested in discussing: If I'm summarizing you correctly, you think standard methods of addressing the problem ("cause allocation in EA is controlled by a few rich people who might not make good decisions") makes Equal Hands an unnecessary project. 

First: I agree with you that the current donation pooling/voting process is not optimal. Hopefully in the six months of the trial a more streamlined option will be found. A fund seems good; knowing the annoying-ness of setting up an appropriate 501c3 and considering the international nature of EA I understand why Abraham didn't go that route before determining whether there was any interest in the project, but I think if it succeeds creating a fund would be good. 

If a fund is created, the main difference between the Equal Hands concept and EA funds is that typical EA funds don't address at all the issue of larger donors having more influence. Yes, experts decide where the amounts within the buckets go. But if one billionaire likes GCR and no billionaires like animal welfare, there will be no mechanism to democratize the distribution between pools. It may be that you don't care about that, but assuming you did, do you see EA funds as addressing that issue in some way that I am missing? 

Second: I agree that a certain amount of donor 3 hiring donor 1 as a consultant or being convinced by a persuasive argument or similar goes on in EA (at least, much more than outside of EA). But the examples you give are such small levels of decision-making sharing. If you endorse the general rule that more decision makers tend to make better decisions than small groups, even when the small groups are composed of experts (which I think there is quite a bit of evidence for?) then a much more robust democratization seems good. 

There's a lot to discuss in this comment so it might be worth unpacking responses into sections. For myself, I'm most interested in your assertion that money is well-correlated with having more accurate views about the world. 

I think you're correct that there is some connection between "accurate views in a domain" to "success in that domain" on average. But I think the main driver of that connection is a correlation at the low end (e.g., people with really faulty pictures of reality are not successful) but no low correlation outside of that range. 

In the case of wealth, while we might expect that being well-attuned to reality is helpful, being "well-attuned to reality" is not a real trait (or if it is, it's extremely rare) -- most people are well-attuned to parts of reality and not others. Furthermore, wealth is in most societies highly driven by being lucky to be born into a particular family. So at the end of the day, we shouldn't expect donors with the most money to generally have the best views on what to do with it. 

In particular, I think that the dynamics in charity make this lack of correlation even more problematic, because the wealthiest folks have disproportionately more control over what happens in charity than the just-relatively-well-off folks, and we particularly shouldn't expect that being wildly wealthy is a good predictor of "being good at figuring out which charities are most impactful." Being insanely wealthy is probably even more luck driven than being successful in a normal way, and the more insanely wealthy you are, the more likely you are to have charities trying to sell themselves to you, and the worse your access to information about them will be. 

Just to reality-test my mental model here against my own experience: you suggest looking at the major donors in EA. By and large, my experience in EA is that there is not really a correlation between wealth and having good ideas about charity. I meet a lot of wealthy people in my job, and they are often shockingly out of touch. Maybe they were better calibrated before they got wealthy, but becoming insanely wealthy reduces how much people are honest to you and makes your life look so different from normal I expect you forget what normal is. Often, the people in EA I think make the best calls are sort of mid-tier employees of EA orgs, who are both thoughtful and have great insider info. 

Even beyond that, EA major donors are a small selection of rich people in general, who by and large I think make absolutely terrible decisions about charity (and I expect you think that also, since you're on the EA forum). So even if I wanted to grant you that these rich people might have accurate views within their domain, I wouldn't grant that that makes them better at choosing charities. 

Basically, my overall point is that (1) really wealthy people are probably mostly really wealthy by chance of circumstance; (2) if not chance, and it is domain expertise in the area of their success, that doesn't largely transfer to success in choosing charities, and (3) based on my experience of EA, wealthy EAs are no more likely to make good decisions than non-wealthy EAs. So I'm comfortable endorsing the idea that having more money is not generally a good predictor of having great ideas about charity. 

I don't really want to get into an argument here about whether extreme wealth is largely luck-driven, or how much success in one domain translates to success in others, since I believe people tend to be firmly entrenched in one view or another on those topics and it could distract from the main topic of the Equal Hands experiment. My intention is merely to illustrate why someone might endorse the original statement. 

Just chiming in to have more than Habryka's view represented here. I think it's not unreasonable in principle to think that OP and GV could create PR distance between themselves. I think it will just take time, and Habryka is being moderately too pessimistic (or, accurately pessimistic in the short term but not considering reasonable long-term potential). I'd guess many think-tank type organizations have launched on the strength of a single funder and come to advise many funders, having a distinct reputation from them -- OP seems to be pursuing this more strongly now than in the past, and while it will take time to work, it seems like a reasonable theory of change.

I have updated, based on this exchange, that OP is more open to investment in non-GV-supported activities than previously came through. I'm happy to hear that. 

I don't want to wake up anymore to somebody I personally loathe getting platformed only to discover I paid for the platform. That fact matters to me.

This is eminently reasonable. Any opposition to these changes I've aired here is more about disappointment in some of the specific cause areas being dropped and the sense that OP couldn't continue on them without GV; I'm definitely not intending to complain about GV's decision, and overall I think OP attempting to diversify funding sources (and EA trying to do so at well) is very, very healthy and needed. 

To clarify, I did see the invitations to other funders. However, my perception was that those are invitations to find people to hand things off to, rather than to be a continuing partner like with GV. Perhaps I misunderstood. 

I also want to be clear that the status quo you're articulating here does not match what I've heard from former grantees about how able OP staff are to participate in efforts to attract additional funding. Perhaps there has been quite a serious miscommunication.

I feel incapable of being heard correctly at this point, so I guess it was a mistake to speak up at all and I'm going to stop now.

Sorry to hear that, several people I've spoken to about this offline also feel that you are being open and agreeable and the discussion reads from the outside as fairly civil, so except perhaps with the potential heat of this exchange with Ollie, I'd say most people get it and are happy you participated, particularly given that you didn't need to. For myself, the bulk of my concern is with how I perceive OP to have handled this given their place in the EA community, rather than my personal and irrelevant partial disagreement with your personal funding decisions.

[edited to add "partial" in the last sentence]