A few months ago I was with several members of the effective altruism community on a video chat about how to compare different effective altruism groups. Someone recommended that we try to have a meta-evaluation to rank them, but on some further discussion it became apparent that that would be incredibly difficult to do.

The different organizations just don’t have the same goals as each other. Many were “effective” within their own standard of epistemology, but not in those of the others. So comparing them was more about comparing general epistemologies then doing direct comparisons of the organizations themselves.

Here is my current attempt at making some sense of the “main” effective altruist groups, based on their disagreements on epistemology.

Charity evaluators

It makes sense to begin with Givewell, because they seem to be the first and most recognized group within Effective Altruism. Upon launch in 2007 they promoted the idea that charities could be evaluated on the efficiency of money put in to the amount of “good” outputted. This was backed up with research by the GiveWell team to identify and recognize the “most efficient” charities. This made a lot of sense to many smart people, but soon things became quite complicated as groups also trying to “do the most good” within charity evaluation emerged to somewhat compete with them.

GiveWell is reluctant to investigate animal welfare charities, seemingly because its founders value animals substantially less than humans. Other people have decided that animals are worth more in respect to humans than Givewell has indicated, and some of these have set up a “GiveWell for Animals”, or Effective Animal Altruism. Aidgrade was established a semi-Givewell competitor and disagrees with them about the proper methods to do charity evaluations.

Effective altruism funders

Then come the more somewhat high-risk meta-charities that promote giving to Effective Altruist groups, like Giving What We Can, The Life You Can Save, and 80,000 Hours. These groups are really interesting to me because on paper what they’re doing seems to be working (Giving What We Can has estimated to be able to encourage the giving of around $8 for every $1 donated to them, for instance).

Yet from what I understand, GiveWell refuses to recommend any of thes

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Ozzie_Gooen

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