All of Sindy_Li's Comments + Replies

I appreciate you writing up these comments! There are some great suggestions here as well as things I disagree with. As the author of the "extremely positive" post let me share some thoughts. (I'm by no means an expert on this so feel free to tell me I'm wrong.)

1. Quantitative cost-effectiveness analysis

Summary of my view: I'm pretty torn on this one but think we may not want to require a quantitative CEA on charities working on policy change (although definitely encourage the GG team to try this exercise).

On one hand I think it's great to at least attempt... (read more)

Thanks for checking -- I think we can leave it here in case someone else missed it :)

Thanks Linch! It's in the last bullet point of the beginning "notes" section and also mentioned in the body of the doc.

Interesting. If most voters are in favor of cutting aid, AND this is clear to the MPs, then why would MPs have an incentive to vote against cutting aid?

• One reason I can think of is if there is a well-organized interest group that, even though small in size, tries very hard to influence the MPs, leading them to help this group rather than the general population. (This seems to be the case in some areas in US policy.) In this case, you may want to create the impression of having a well-organized interest group -- which seems hard, but I wonder what strategie

Related, I wonder if the emails are still a bit boilerplate as after seeing a few maybe the MP can tell how they were generated? I imagine there are people who know

• generally what works best in influencing lawmakers / lobbying
• specifically what works well in the UK

so would be curious what strategies they would propose.

(I wonder if something like doing an opinion poll of voters and presenting that info would help, but not sure how practical that is. Perhaps you could partner with someone already doing a poll / a major website or newspaper.)

Thanks for sharing your experience! I'll share mine. I attended the workshop in July 2019 in California.

Like you, I also came in with the hope of becoming a hyper efficient rationality machine, overcoming problems like procrastination that I struggled with all my life. I was hoping to be taught how to use my System 2 to fight my lazy, uncooperative System 1 that always stood in the way of achieving my goals.

My biggest surprise was that the workshop was much more about understanding, working with, and leveraging your System 1. I was unconvinced and confused... (read more)

Thank you for your post! I am an IDinsight researcher who was heavily involved in this project and I will share some of my perspectives (if I'm misrepresenting GiveWell,  feel free to let me know!):

• My understanding is GiveWell wanted multiple perspectives to inform their moral weights, including a utilitarian perspective of respecting beneficiaries/recipient's preferences, as well as others (examples here). Even though beneficiary preferences may not the the only factor, it is an important one and one where empirical evidence was lacking before the st

Hi,

Staying in your current job for a bit to help your family (as well as build a bit of runway) makes a lot of sense.

Re future career paths:

• If you are interested in getting into policy in your home country: I'm not sure which South Asian country you're from, if it's India, I've seen some IAS officers getting degrees from top US policy schools. Having such talents joining the civil service sounds like it could have really positive impact, but I'm not sure if working there will be frustrating. It's probably good to talk to people who have worked there.
  • Anothe

Some more examples I found in their concept note:

• "to meet emission reduction targets under the Kyoto agreement, the Swiss government committed to purchasing 2 million tons of certified emissions credits between 2015 and 2020 (estimated at $24 million USD1 ) by financing an NGO distributing water-purifying chlorine dispensers in Africa. Did the $24 million reduce 2 million tons in carbon emissions? Almost certainly not, as the assumption households would boil water in absence of the filters was untrue." (Footnote 1. Note that chlorine dispensers treat water

Hi Jason, your blog is really interesting. I wonder if you have any medium/long term theory of change of how your work or the progress studies community (if there is such a community yet, or in the future) will have real world impact, e.g. how you or others in your community plan to engage with researchers/academics (e.g. to collaborate or build the field), policy makers, investors, scientist, technologists, entrepreneurs etc. And what some concrete changes you hope to see/affect.

(Do you just focus on research or also aim for real world impact? (And in either case, how do you measure the success of your project?)

I see. Let me know if I'm understanding this correctly: Founders Pledge aims to have cost-effectiveness estimate numbers, which involves a lot of work especially for topics like growth and climate change, whereas Open Phil takes a more qualitative approach for such topics with higher uncertainty. (If so, I am also curious about the philosophy behind your approach -- I'm really uncertain which one works better, and that's a bigger conversation.)

Re topics to look into, I second Michael's suggestions: labor markets, firms, and monetary policy in developing co... (read more)

BTW, have you checked out Nick Bloom's work on management practice? He shows it's a significant constraint on productivity in LMICs (of course, maybe not as fundamental as institutions/politics, but could still be an important one). This interview with him is interesting: https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/nicholas-bloom/

Thanks a lot for your research and writeup! Really nice to see follow-up work on this topic.

A few thoughts:

• Is growth work neglected? I'm not sure if that's the right question to ask. After all, "micro" development (direct service delivery) type work isn't neglected -- tons of money go into it each year -- but most had no good evidence behind it, which motivated the founding of GiveWell, IDinsight etc. So perhaps whether "effective" work in growth is neglected is the more relevant question. Though I agree with you that it may be hard to assess the field as

It's really exciting to see EA-based charity analysis in other countries! A few quick comments/questions:

• Re the standout charities, you said "This is because none of the organizations’ Philippine operations have had a full cost-effectiveness analysis done by GiveWell." It may be feasible to adjust GiveWell's CEA for some of these, e.g. for deworming, you can vary parameters like baseline worm prevalence. I'm not sure how doable it is but just an idea to explore.
• I think it's definitely a great idea to communicate this more widely and promote evidence-based

Thanks for your reply! Please keep us posted here on your plan and how to donate etc. as you figure them out.

Another thought: may be helpful to work with some experienced NGO or someone experienced in political campaigning to craft the fb ads, targeting strategy etc. Seems like a pretty specialized thing worth drawing from existing expertise to maximize the chance of success.

Thanks Sanjay! This looks really important. For those considering supporting you, would be helpful to see something like

• Timeline -- how urgent this is, e.g. when the voting is expected to happen
• Any details of the plan to the extent you have it, e.g. which Tory MPs are relevant (the journalist mentioned some MPs are angry -- do they know which ones?), rough estimate of budget
• "I get the impression that it's not clear that the government will win on this." Why is that? (Or mostly based on what the journalist said?)
• Any lesson from similar previous campaigns (you probably don't time to do a deep analysis, but anything quick would probably help)

Thanks for your work -- this looks awesome! In case you haven't, may be worth talking to  similar  groups based on profession like Founders Pledge and Raising for Effective Giving about their experience.

On increasing and decreasing (marginal) returns:

I see that you said "claiming that expected returns are normally diminishing is compatible with expecting that true returns increase over some intervals. I think that true returns often do increase over some intervals, but that returns generally decrease in expectation."

I wasn't sure why this would be true in a model that describes the organization's behavior, so I spent some time thinking it through. Here is a way to reconcile increasing returns and decreasing expected returns, with a graph. Note t... (read more)

Tom and Peter:

For an early stage charity like ACE it seems that capacity building is indeed a very important consideration (related to Ben Todd's point about the growth approach). E.g. it would allow them to move much more money later, and at the moment moving not that much money is a reason why they don't look so good in our model. Unfortunately we aren't able to incorporate this in our quantitative model (IMO another reason to look beyond quantitative models for decision making at this point, but people may have ways of incorporating it quantitatively --... (read more)

Max, thanks for the post!

For someone like GiveWell that spends a lot of time investigating charities, they may have enough information about the charity's budget to tell when there is (something similar to) a discrete jump in the derivative of the returns function. E.g. the way they talk about "capacity-relevant funding" and "execution funding" in the post you linked to ("incentive funding" is for a completely different purpose that has no direct relationship with returns).

Also, to fix ideas it helps to think what we represent... (read more)

My personal take on the issue is that, the better we understand how the updating works (including how to select the prior), the more seriously we should take the results. Currently we don't seem to have a good understanding (e.g. see Dickens' discussion: the way of selecting the median based on Give Directly seems reasonable, but there doesn't seem to be a principled way of selecting the variance, and this seems to be the best effort at it so far), so these updating exercises can be used as heuristics but the results are not to be taken too seriously, and ... (read more)

Peter, indeed your point #2 about uncertainty is what I discuss in the last point of "2) Outcome measures", under "Model limitations". I argued in a handwaving way that because 80K still causes some lower risk and lower return global health type interventions -- which our aggregation model seems to favor, probably due to the Bayesian prior -- it will probably still beat MIRI that focuses exclusively on high risk, high return things that the model seems to penalize. But yes we should have modeled it in this way.

Robin, for what you quoted about increasing returns I was thinking only in the case of labor. Overall you are right that, if the organization has been maximizing cost-effectiveness, then they probably would have used the money they had before reaching fundraising targets in a way that makes it more cost-effective than money coming in later (assuming they are more certain about the amount of money up to fundraising target, and less certain about money coming in after that).

Something that will complicate the effects is that money given to people may increase not only consumption today but also consumption tomorrow through investment. This could be investments in physical capital (e.g. iron roof, livestocks) or human capital (e.g. health and education). Most of the time when people are given money, some will be consumed and some saved/invested (and consumption itself could have investment effects too, if better nutrition improves ability to work/learn), e.g. see Give Directly recipients.

This is relevant if we think that, for i... (read more)

Ben, to recap a bit what people have said: working as a software engineer at an EA organization

• may not be the most technically challenging/engaging job
• may not be great for future career development
• may not pay much

This probably applies more to EA organizations like CEA and 80,000 Hours. Give Directly may be different since you probably work with Mpesa, similar to Wave; and maybe New Incentives too since they do conditional cash transfers.

And Wave is basically like a regular tech company in the above aspects (and probably better because it's a startup ... (read more)

Something relevant: how the Trump presidency can affect global health http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21715736-global-gag-rule-likely-hit-fight-against-hiv-aids-policy-intended-cut

Wave is really good! (I use it) Another thing one can do is to work for some mobile money company in a developing country to design products that benefit the poor (e.g. saving, credit, that I mention in the other post), like the American guys I met in Myanmar's Wave Money (but they are still early stage and has many challenges before having an impact). (Not suggesting you should do it though -- involves moving to a developing country etc., and could be much less likely to succeed due to regulations etc.). BTW this is the mobile credit scoring company I had in mind: http://tala.co/.

I just got back from Myanmar and I talked with some people running Wave Money (one of the mobile money companies in Myanmar, and the only licensed one so far; not related to the Wave that Jeff mentioned which sends money to Africa).

• Getting people to adopt could be a big challenge, depending on the country. In Kenya, the anecdotal story of why mobile money took off so quickly is 1) the need to send remittances, 2) preexisting methods for this being not very good for various reasons (insecurity is one); some also argue that Safaricom's unusually high marke

Hi carneades, in reply I just want to make 2 general points here:

1. Many things need to be done in the developing world, e.g.the ones you mentioned: protecting people against malaria, creating jobs, improving the quality of governments... The most effective intervention for one purpose could be not very useful for another, but that's still okay because it would be better than trying to do something that serves multiple purposes but is ineffective in all of them. (e.g. for protecting people against malaria, the most effective intervention could be distributi

Because it is helpful to think about exactly what intervention is needed to help mobile money expand (which may differ by country), I'm throwing here a few potential barriers (mostly based on my own experience in Kenya and Myanmar):

• Regulatory barriers (India allowed it only recently because of this; in Myanmar it's still ongoing)

• Network effects: in Kenya I heard that an important reason it took off was that Safaricom had a very high market share (maybe near 70%?); in Nigeria I heard that the fragmentation of the telecommunication market is one reason i

Hi carneades, thank you for your post! It is great to see a post by an international development professional on effective altruism. As someone who did field work in Africa during PhD, I am sympathetic to what you conclude from your own observation. However, it is important to see what rigorous studies conclude and based on my reading of the literature I have some disagreements.

1. On job creation, taking into account the environment in most poor countries in terms of infrastructure, legal environment and productivity of the labor force, it would be much mor