All of GiveWell's Comments + Replies

We want to share a few thoughts that might help clarify our approach.

Our research incorporates potential downsides or unintended consequences, such that our recommendations take into account factors like potential side effects. Most (if not all) of the information in Leif Wenar’s WIRED piece is something that anyone could find on our website. However, we believe some of what is published in the piece is misleading or inaccurate. Here is a lightly edited version of the material that GiveWell sent to WIRED in response to a request for comment on Leif Wenar's piece. 

Hi Ian, thanks for sharing this article – our team wrote up some notes on how this topic intersects with our work, and I (Isabel Arjmand writing on behalf of GiveWell) thought it might be useful to share here.

Like the Bloomberg editorial board, we're concerned about stalling progress in the fight against malaria, but we're skeptical that quality issues with PermaNet 2.0s have influenced this progress as much as the article suggests.

All things considered, we believe that malaria nets are, and have been, highly effective in reducing malaria burden. The Again... (read more)

We've haven't explicitly modeled diminishing returns in this way. Most of the opportunities we consider are for specific pre-defined gaps, so they're more discrete than something you can really scale in that continuous type of way.

We don't select/structure our grants such that we necessarily think the "last dollar" or marginal dollar to that grant is 10x cash. For example: if there was a discrete $5M funding opportunity to support a program in a specific area, we might model the cost-effectiveness of that opportunity as say, 15x overall, but there wouldn't be any particular reason to think the 'last dollar' was more like 10x. Generally, when it comes to funding discrete opportunities (e.g. vaccination promotion in a certain state in Nigeria), we don't tend to think about the value o... (read more)

Thanks to Vasco for reaching out to ask whether GiveWell has considered: 

• e-Government procurement (benefit-to-cost ratio of 125)
• Trade (95)
• Land tenure security (21).

GiveWell has not looked into any of these three areas. We'd likely expect both the costs and the benefits to be fairly specific to the particular context and intervention. For example, rather than estimating the impact of reduced tariffs broadly, we'd ask something along the lines of: What is the intervention that can actually e.g., lead to a reduction in tariffs? On which set of goods/serv... (read more)

Thanks SoGive for the post! We wanted to share some of GiveWell's current thinking around malaria vaccines in case it's helpful. We also wrote a report on RTS,S in 2022 here and have recommended a couple grants for vaccine rollout and research.

On a cost-per-person-reached basis, we agree ITNs and SMC are superior to either of the two WHO-approved malaria vaccines. However, we think there's less of a differential in cost-effectiveness than this post implies, for a number of reasons:

• The difference in all-in delivery costs is probably less substantial: W

Hi Vasco,

Thanks for your comment! To clarify, our funding bar being 10x cash doesn't mean that every grant we make will be to things that are 10x cash – it means that we'll generally fund all of the programs we find that are above 10x, and not the ones that we estimate to be below 10x (with caveats that sometimes we will/won't make grants that fall on either side of that line for other reasons not captured in the CEA, e.g. learning value). You can read more on how we make funding decisions here.

Many of the grants we make are above 10x, including a fair amo... (read more)

Hi Sanjay - thanks for the close read! You're right that Figure 3 should read 95%, not 90% - we're working on correcting the figure and will update the post ASAP. Thanks again!

Hi there - thanks so much for catching this! Our malnutrition CEA is not yet public because it's still a work-in-progress. I've removed the hyperlink accordingly. Thanks again!

Hi Vasco and Caleb, we appreciate the interest in the Global Health and Development Fund! This is Isabel Arjmand responding on behalf of GiveWell.

We're grateful for the opportunity to manage this fund, and we think it's a great opportunity for donors who want to support highly cost-effective global health and development programs. We're also interested in having more in-depth conversations with Caleb and others involved in EA Funds about what the future of this fund should look like, and we’ll reach out to schedule that.

In the meantime, here are some notes... (read more)

Hi Froolow,

Thank you so much for this thoughtful review!

We've looked through the issues you identify as errors, and we believe that each of those is either not an error or is something we've deprioritized because addressing it would not change our grantmaking decisions. You can see our analysis here.

This only applies to the potential errors you pointed out, not your higher-level feedback or judgment calls. We're grateful for your engagement here, and we are working on improving the architecture of our CEAs, in line with your higher-level feedback. We also ... (read more)

I’m glad you found this response helpful!

We expect to wait until the results of FEM’s RCT are available before deciding whether to recommend funding for the program itself; we do have some remaining uncertainties, and it's possible that additional work could lead to significant changes in our cost-effectiveness estimate. We also plan to continue our own research on family planning programs in general, which may affect our funding decisions in this area.

As our investigations progress, we’ll share updates on our website. Please feel free to reach out directly if you have questions in the meantime!

Best,

Roman Guglielmo

Donor Relations Associate

GiveWell

Hi Michael,

Thank you for raising these points! We’ve shared your thoughts with our research team for future consideration.

If you have any other questions or concerns about our work, please feel free to reach out to us!

Roman Guglielmo

Donor Relations Associate

GiveWell

Hi!

Thanks for this comment. We are interested in potentially funding family planning programs, including Family Empowerment Media. Our research and grant decisions are independent of our outreach and fundraising plans. To clarify and add detail on some of the points above:

GiveWell recommended a $500,000 grant to Family Empowerment Media in March 2023. This funding would support a planned randomized controlled trial (RCT) of its program. We haven't yet published about this grant, but we plan to soon. (Our grant page publication often lags our funding decisi... (read more)

Hi, Hakon,

We were very excited to learn of this trial, a much-needed step toward reducing deaths from tuberculosis. We applaud Gates and Wellcome for this sizable commitment of resources, which is, as Nick points out, necessary to gain adequate information about the vaccine's efficacy, but beyond the reach of most funders.

We have investigated TB-related funding opportunities, and we remain very open to funding either programs or research. However, we have several significant uncertainties about the programs we've explored so far and have not yet funded any... (read more)

Hi, Nick,

Yes, to clarify, MiracleFeet is selecting the on-the-ground evaluator that will conduct the monitoring in each location, although GiveWell will lightly vet MiracleFeet's choices and meet with each evaluator.

The primary purpose of the monitoring grant is to understand how many children are treated for clubfoot both with and without MiracleFeet's support. So, although MiracleFeet has records of children treated through facilities it's supported, we also want an assessment of baseline treatment coverage before MiracleFeet launches its program (or exp... (read more)

Hi, Nick,

Thanks for your comments, your insight into this grant, and your support! 

We do expect to get input from local hospital staff on existing treatment coverage through the baseline surveys. The monitoring grant will fund the creation of a sampling frame that includes both public and private health facilities, which we think will yield more complete data than contacting hospitals through our partners.

We agree that potential bias from external evaluators is a risk for the reasons you've mentioned. While we won't be involved in the selection of eva... (read more)

Hi, J.T.,

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you! 

In an ideal world, we would have included financial burden for tobacco in these rough calculations (which were mostly intended to narrow down what we'd focus on in our initial foray into public health regulation grants). But essentially, the last line of your response is the answer: because we value children's lives so highly, we expected that incorporating the financial burden of tobacco use would not be enough for us to prioritize it over lead. Lead specifically affects young children, and the gap... (read more)

Hi, J.T.,

As shown by the research conversation notes you link to, GiveWell lightly explored funding tobacco control policy advocacy in the past. Ultimately we decided to focus on other policy areas (alcohol policy, lead exposure, and self-harm from pesticide ingestion) that appeared more neglected. You can read more about our public health regulation research on this page—see "Cause areas we investigated at a shallow level and deprioritized," and this spreadsheet, linked from footnote 24, which gives our estimates of how much is spent on tobacco policy (an... (read more)

Thanks for this thoughtful post, Tom. You’ve definitely raised some thoughts that have been on our mind recently, such as how GiveWell could systematically incorporate more external input into our grant-making process. We’ve taken some steps towards this, such as with a beneficiary survey in 2019, and seeking out more external experts, but we’d like to do more – it was really great to read through your recommendations. 

We did want to clarify, however, that GiveWell’s approach to modeling cost-effectiveness and making grant recommendations is heav... (read more)

Hi, Peter! So sorry I missed this question earlier and have been delayed in responding.

We've described in the above post what we know about R21 so far (see the second and third paragraphs from the end). To summarize, R21 has been shown to have high efficacy in protecting against malaria, but it's unclear to us so far how generalizable those results will be. R21 is also reportedly less complicated to manufacture, which could be helpful as demand for malaria vaccine is expected to outstrip supply - but we can't independently verify this. We'll keep monitoring the literature on R21, and we'll consider any funding opportunities as they come up.

Best,

Miranda Kaplan

GiveWell Communications Associate

Hi, Nick,

Thanks for your comment! Apologies that it took a while to respond to this.

Re: how much funding is needed to successfully roll out the vaccine, we've provided a budget breakdown on the grant page. The majority of this funding is going toward training and other activities needed to distribute the vaccine, vaccine-related supplies, and shipping and handling for the doses donated by GSK. Only about $1.8 million of the total, or less than half, is going toward the costs of having PATH and WHO provide technical support for this project. 

For e... (read more)

Hi, Jesper,

Thank you for this post, and apologies that it took a while for us to respond!

We agree that more public information clarifying the value of donating to these large charities would be helpful. One thing that has changed about GiveWell since the 2011 blog post is that we now have a much larger staff and have gained more research experience, so we have more capacity to investigate the complicated questions that working with very large charities can bring up. We're now more open to investigating opportunities within "mega-charities" than we were pre... (read more)

GiveWell is hiring for a number of different roles: https://www.givewell.org/about/jobs. We offer flexible hours, benefits, and the ability to work remotely. You may want to check out the content editor position in particular, if you're looking for flexibility. Good luck! 

Hi, Joseph! I sent you a PM with a contact who can advise you/your parents according to the specifics of their situation.

Best, Miranda Kaplan GiveWell Communications Associate

Hi Robi, thanks for the question! This is Isabel Arjmand from GiveWell – I wrote the above post, and I run the model we use to forecast funds raised.

The uncertainty primarily stems from the fact that Open Philanthropy is in the process of reconsidering how it allocates funding across cause areas.

We’ve spoken with Open Philanthropy about their plans, and our understanding is that the amount of funding Open Philanthropy might give to GiveWell in the future is highly uncertain at this point. Our impression is that it could be hundreds of millions of dollars a... (read more)

Hi, Joel,

Alex here, responding to your comment. Thank you for taking the time to give us this feedback!

In response to some of your specific points: 

• You're right that we should have characterized the results from Lång and Nystedt (2018) as mixed rather than positive. Thanks for pointing out that mistake. We will update the spreadsheet so that study is correctly color-coded, and update the relevant part of the post. With this adjustment, among the studies we looked at, 3 suggest decreasing effects over time, 2 suggest increasing effects over t

Hi, Kaleem and Guy!

This is Miranda Kaplan, communications associate at GiveWell. I'll answer both questions here, since they're closely related.

This adjustment updated GiveWell's overall impression of deworming by around 10%. But the bottom-line takeaway on deworming—which is that it's one of the most cost-effective programs we know of in some locations, but we have a higher degree of uncertainty about it than we do our top charities—hasn't changed much, and we think that should probably continue to be the takeaway for followers of our work. 

You can s... (read more)

In response to HLI's feedback, we've added a 10% downward adjustment to our deworming cost-effectiveness analysis to account for the benefits of deworming decaying over time. We describe in detail how we arrived at this adjustment in this separate Forum post.

[This was originally posted as a response in the wrong thread - I've deleted the incorrectly placed response.]

Hi, David,

Thanks for tagging us in this suggestion! We're happy to see people talking about the creation of more compelling resources to correct misperceptions and get people thinking about the true cost of saving a life. 

This doesn't seem exactly like what you have in mind, as it was more narrowly focused on GiveWell's recommended charities, but in the past we provided an impact calculator on our site.  It allowed users to insert a donat... (read more)

Hey, David - yes, the section of the post you linked to contains our thinking on possible changes that could result from COM Contest critiques. We are still in the process of figuring out what specific changes we might make to our analyses based on these critiques.

Best, Miranda (GiveWell communications associate)

Hi, Thomas,

We agree that the language you highlight is misleading, and we're sorry that it was included in the ad. It wasn't a part of the copy we provided to advertisers, and we didn't notice it in our review of the ad before it went live.

We're now speaking to the agency that coordinates these ads about the possibility of updating the video, but we think this is unlikely to happen, as the ad has already been live as is for some time and can't easily be reuploaded.

Thank you for bringing this to our attention!

Best,

Miranda (GiveWell Communications Associate)

Hi, Bob,

We're very sorry to hear that you had a bad experience! We take feedback like this seriously and have passed it on to the senior staff in charge of research hiring. 

Responding to all applicants in as timely a manner as we'd like has been challenging, in large part due to understaffing on the research team. But, we are working to improve on this. We invite others who may be considering applying for one of our research positions to review our FAQs for more information about the hiring process, including the typical timeline.  &nbs... (read more)

Hi, Tom,

Thanks for your question! There really isn't a tremendous difference between the two in terms of purpose—both are allocated to global health and development opportunities, either among GiveWell's top charities or to other programs that are high-expected-value. The EA Global Health and Development Fund preceded the All Grants Fund, which we launched in August of this year. 

Best,

Miranda

Hi, kokotajlod,

Thank you for following our work; we're happy to have been a part of your journey! Apologies for the delay in responding here.

I'm not sure if by "your recommendations," you mean GiveWell's top charities, or our advice in the above post on giving to the All Grants Fund. It'd be pretty challenging to answer your question if it's about the All Grants Fund, since that money can go to any grant that meets our bar. We expect that a lot of All Grants Fund donations will support grants to top charities, but they could also support other programs, an... (read more)

Hi, Peter! It's roughly the former - $600M at 10x cash (or higher) and an additional $300M in opportunities that are 6-9x cash.

Hi, Akash - all else equal, starting sooner is better, but the date is negotiable. We care more about finding someone who is an excellent fit for the role than when they can start, since we hope we’ll be working together over the long term. Thanks!

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