Michael Townsend🔸

Program Associate @ Open Philanthropy
2534 karmaJoined Working (0-5 years)Tamarama NSW 2026, Australia

Bio

Program Associate on Open Phil's Global Catastrophic Risks Capacity Building team. 
🔸 GWWC Pledger

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Just speaking for myself, I'd guess those would be the cruxes, though I don't personally see easy-fixes. I also worry that you could also err on being too cautious, by potential adding warning labels that give people an overly negative impression compared to the underlying reality. I'm curious if there are examples where you think GWWC could strike a better balance.

I think this might be symptomatic of a broader challenge for effective giving for GCR, which is that most of the canonical arguments for focusing on cost-effectiveness involve GHW-specific examples, that don't clearly generalize to the GCR space. But I don't think that indicates you shouldn't give to GCR, or care about cost-effectiveness in the GCR space — from a very plausible worldview (or at least, the worldview I have!) the GCR-focused funding opportunities are the most impactful funding opportunities available. It's just that the kind of reasoning underlying those recommendations/evaluations are quite different.

(I no longer work at GWWC, but wrote the reports on the LTFF/ECF, and was involved in the first round of evaluations more generally.) 

In general, I think GWWC's goal here is to "to support donors in having the highest expected impact given their worldview" which can come apart from supporting donors to give to the most well-researched/vetted funding opportunities. For instance, if you have a longtermist worldview, or perhaps take AI x-risk very seriously, then I'd guess you'd still want to give to the LTFF/ECF even if you thought the quality of their evaluations was lower than GiveWell's.

Some of this is discussed in "Why and how GWWC evaluates evaluators" in the limitations section:

Finally, the quality of our recommendations is highly dependent on the quality of the charity evaluation field in a cause area, and hence inconsistent across cause areas. For example, the state of charity evaluation in animal welfare is less advanced than that in global health and wellbeing, so our evaluations and the resulting recommendations in animal welfare are necessarily lower-confidence than those in global health and wellbeing.

And also in each of the individual reports, e.g. from the ACE MG report:

As such, our bar for relying on an evaluator depends on the existence and quality of other donation options we have evaluated in the same cause area.

  • In cause areas where we currently rely on one or more evaluators that have passed our bar in a previous evaluation, any new evaluations we do will attempt to compare the quality of the evaluator’s marginal grantmaking and/or charity recommendations to those of the evaluator(s) we already rely on in that cause area. 
  • For worldviews and associated cause areas where we don’t have existing evaluators we rely on, we expect evaluators to meet the bar of plausibly recommending giving opportunities that are among the best options for their stated worldview, compared to any other opportunity easily accessible to donors.

First just wanted to say that this:

In my first year after taking the pledge, I gave away 20% of my income. However I had been able to save and invest much of my disposable income from my relatively well paid career before taking the pledge and so had built up strong financial security for myself and my family. As a result, I increased my donations over time and since 2019, have given away 75% of my income. 


...is really inspiring :).

I'm interested in knowing more about how Allan decides where to donate. For example:

I currently split my donations between the Longview Philanthropy Emerging Challenges Fund and the Long Term Future Fund- I believe in giving to funds and letting experts with much more knowledge than me identify the best donation opportunities.

How did Allan arrive at this decision, and how confident does he feel in it? Also, how connected does Allan feel with other EtG'ers who are giving a similar amounts based on a similar worldview?

Just on this point:

Relatedly, it feels like this is not what the username field is for. If I'm interacting with someone on some topic unrelated to my advocacy it feels intrusive and uncooperative to be bringing it into the conversation

I think this argument might have a lot of power among folks who tend to think of social norms in quite explicit/analytical terms, and who put a lot of emphasis on being cooperative. But I suspect relatively few people will see this as uncooperative/intrusive, because the pin and the idea it's advocating are pretty non-offensive. 

Luke, thank you for everything you've done for GWWC and the world. 

I don’t think many people get to meet someone with such extraordinary levels of care, both for those far away in space/time, and loved ones nearby. While I was working at GWWC, Luke’s most common reason to take a day off was to help someone move house. Luke, your kindness, integrity and commitment are contagious — even with you no longer at the organization, those virtues will stay with GWWC in large part because of how you demonstrated them.

Here’s a graph of new 10% Pledgers since Luke joined GWWC.[1]

 

  1. ^

    Courtesy of Claude… though my critical feedback for it is that it makes it look like 2024 hasn’t happened yet, and that Luke joined in 2019. Both false!

Unfortunately, I can't see that option — it just displays my email. 

Thanks for sharing this, and more importantly, for writing it. From my perspective, this is the best reporting on AI that I've seen. I've shared it with previously ultra-sceptical friends, and had an uncharacteristically positive response. 

Hi Vasco — not all organisations shared permission to have their name shared, but it includes many of the fundraising organisations on this list.

Giving What We Can is looking for a Researcher to help us identify the most effective donation opportunities for a variety of worldviews, and recommend these to our donors.

Salary and benefits: Salary for candidates is based on this calculator (which is explained in more depth here). Benefits and policies depend on location, but we aim to provide benefits equally wherever we can. See here for an example of an offer to a US candidate — we have similar benefits in other locations.

Location: Remote.

Apply here by February 18th March 2nd

Essential skills, traits and experience

  • A passion for making the world a better place
  • Strong grasp of key research concepts in effective giving and effective altruism
  • A scout mindset and a strong commitment to communicating accurately and truthfully
  • Excellent analytical skills; comfort working with quantitative and qualitative frameworks
  • Probabilistic reasoning and calibration; the ability to think in a Bayesian way
  • Prioritisation and judgement; the ability to (re-)focus your time on what’s most important and relevant
  • Ability to work both autonomously and in a team; comfort with working remotely
  • Good reasoning transparency

Desirable skills, traits and experience

  • Experience in impact-focused charity evaluation and/or grantmaking
  • Great written communication skills, especially in translating technical information to be understandable and compelling to the public
  • Generalist skills and flexibility and adaptability to other types of valuable work needed at various times, in addition to the responsibilities mentioned above

About GWWC: GWWC is on a mission to create a world in which giving effectively and significantly is a cultural norm. The GWWC team is hard-working and mission-focused, with a culture of open and honest feedback. We also like to think of ourselves as a particularly friendly and optimistic bunch.

In all our work, we strive to take a positive and collaborative attitude, be transparent in our communication and decision-making, and adopt a scout mindset to guide us towards doing the most good we can do, including by evaluating our own impact and learning from the results. To learn more, check out our current strategy.

The process

Our hiring process involves four stages (applicants will be compensated for their time spent on stages 2-3):

  1. Application form (~2 hours)
  2. Written work test (~2 hours)
  3. Work trial (~10 hours)
  4. Interview, online over Zoom (~1 hour) and reference checks.

We will close applications on the 2nd of March and aim to make an offer (provided we find a suitable candidate) by the end of April, with the successful candidate starting as soon as possible thereafter.

See also here to get a sense of our approach from a hiring round we did in early 2022.

Thanks Vasco, this is good feedback.

To better reflect how your different recommendations are linked to particular worldviews, I think it would be good to change the name of your area/fund "global health and wellbeing" to "global human health and wellbeing"

We considered a wide variety of names, and after some deliberation (and a survey or two), we landed on "global health and wellbeing" because we think it is a good balance of accurate and compelling. I agree with some the limitations you outlined, and like your alternative suggestion, especially from a "Researcher's" point of view where I'm very focused on. I'll share this with the team, but I expect that there would be too much cost switch at this point. 

However, I wonder how much of your and Sjir's views are being driven by path dependence. [...] Given this, I worry you may hesitate to recommend interventions in animal welfare over human welfare even if you found it much more plausible that both areas should be assessed under the same (impartial welfarist) worldview.

It's a bit tricky to respond to this having not (at least yet) done an analysis comparing animal versus human interventions. But for if/when we do, I agree it would be important to be aware of the incentives you mentioned, and to avoid making decisions based on path dependencies rather than high quality research. More generally, a good part of our motivation for this project was to help create better incentives for the effective giving ecosystem. So we'd see coming to difficult decisions on cause-prioritisation, if we thought they were justified, as very much within the scope of our work and a way it could add value.

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