All of Sjir Hoeijmakers's Comments + Replies

Congratulations both to Zach for taking on this important role and to CEA for finding such a capable candidate! Based on my personal interactions with Zach, I'm excited to see where he'll lead CEA and optimistic about him contributing to a strong, principles-based EA community. He seems to me a person both of high integrity and professionalism, who deeply cares about making the world a better place, and who is able to set and execute on a vision. From a GWWC perspective, also looking forward to collaborating with him in his new capacity on making effective giving and effective altruism principles more broadly more of a global norm!

Agreed (though personally I might be willing to make a bet if e.g. fund manager selection is done well)

Very excited about this, both about the clarification of scope and the scope itself.

I strongly agree there is currently a gap in terms of principles-first EA funders, and also largely agree with the way you've outlined "principles-first EA" here. I think this new scope will make me seriously consider becoming a donor to the EAIF in the new year.

That's great to hear Jonas, please let us know if we can do anything else to help! As mentioned in our reports and back when we announced the project, part of the motivation for doing this work is to support other effective giving organisations like Giv Effektivt to be able to make more informed decisions on their recommendations.

And yes, agree that these comments provide a bit of the next layer... let's see where it stops!

Thanks Andrew. I hope I answered most of your question by my response to MHR above, but on the EV part: (caveating that I am not speaking on behalf of EV here nor have legal expertise on the governance question, but giving my personal understanding of the situation here)

GWWC and EA Funds are separate projects within EV; are managed separately; and communicate separately. I would be surprised if we were to discontinue supporting the EA Funds on our donation platform, given they clearly meet our inclusion criteria, but there is no need/pressure for us to rec... (read more)

Thank you! Great question. I can't speak on behalf of EA Funds and their plans going forward, but I can say our new GWWC cause area funds are meaningfully different from their funds (at least as they've been operating so far).

The biggest differences IMO are

• The EA Funds generally (with the exception of the GHD Fund) only make grants to organisations that apply for funding with them.
• The EA Funds are managed by a limited set of expert grantmakers.

Our GWWC cause area funds, on the other hand, ultimately aim to cover recommendations and grantmaking by near... (read more)

Thank you! As we mention in the report, we're grateful for how you've engaged with our evaluations process, and I think this comment is a good illustration of the open, constructive and collaborative attitude you've had throughout it. We look forward to re-evaluating ACE's work next year, and in the meantime remain excited to host many of ACE's funds and recommendations on our donation platform as promising opportunities for donors to consider.

Hi Moritz, yes if you ask me personally, I would currently lean towards recommending MG over a randomly picked ACE recommended charity, though I'm far from confident in this / it's not a claim I would be able to justify to the extent we usually want to justify our recommendations as GWWC. It's mainly based on my view that the difference between the AWF and MG is fairly small (both are broadly trying to make cost-effective grants and are getting promising applications on the margin), whereas our criticism of ACE's charity evaluations process a bit more fund... (read more)

Thanks for your question!

The important nuance here is that while we did not think ACE's current charity evaluation process measures marginal cost-effectiveness to a sufficient extent to directly rely on ACE's recommendations, that isn't the same as the (stronger) claim that its recommendations are necessarily worse donation opportunities than the AWF or THL's corporate campaigns, and it also isn't the same as claiming that ACE's process doesn't track marginal cost-effectiveness at all.

We can't say confidently how ACE's (other) recommendations compare to th... (read more)

Thank you, Peter, we're obviously very happy to hear this!

So by default, GFI, Sinergia, Fish Welfare Initiative, Kafessiz and DVF were all excluded from potentially being identified (which seems illogical, as there is no obvious reason to think that charities evaluated in 2022 would be less cost-effective)

Yes they were, as were any other charities than the three charities we asked ACE to send us more information on (based on where they thought they could make the strongest case by our lights). Among those, we think ACE provided the strongest case for THL's corporate campaigns, and with the additional referral ... (read more)

Thanks for your comments and questions, James.

Surely if you thought that EA AWF was a good evaluator or donation opportunity for donors, you would just let them manage the entirety of the fund? As then EA AWF would be able to distribute to THL if they actually thought THL was the most effective use of funds on the margin. And if not, even better, as they can give to more effective opportunities.

The short answer is "no": we don't think we can currently justify the claim that giving to the AWF is better than giving to THL's corporate campaigns, or vice v... (read more)

Thanks Lauren for your question, and thanks Vasco for helping to answer it! I've replied to the comment under the post on our evaluations that I believe you're referring to, and am happy to elaborate on any part of my answer there (and what's in the report / what Vasco shared) if helpful.

We explain more how we view funds vs charities more generally here.

And for the GWWC cause area funds we answer your question for each individual fund on their page, e.g. here for the Global Health and Wellbeing Fund, under "How does donating to this fund compare to similar giving opportunities?".

Thanks for your question! We explain the general principles we used to choose which evaluator to investigate here, and go into our specific considerations for each evaluator in their evaluation reports.

For FP's GCR Fund compared to LTFF and LLF specifically, some of the main considerations were (1) our donors had so far been donating most to the LTFF, so the stakes were higher there, and (2) Longview was one of the most-named options by other effective giving organisations as an evaluator they weren't relying on yet but were interested in learning more abo... (read more)

First of all, thank you for the extensive comments!

I can give more context during our AMA next week if helpful (I won't have much time to engage in the coming few days unfortunately), but wanted to just quickly react to avoid a misunderstanding about our views here. I've copy-pasted from the relevant section from the report below:

To be clear, there are strong limitations to this recommendation:

• We didn’t ourselves evaluate THL’s work directly, nor did we compare it to other charities (e.g., ACE’s other recommendations).
• The availability of evidence here may

Yes that's right, thanks Arvin!

For anyone reading this at a later time, we have now updated the status of our deworming charities in line with the above discussion and new research by Founders Pledge.

The changes are as follows:

• Unlimit Health (formerly “SCI”), Sightsavers, DWI → Top-Rated
• The END Fund to remain listed.

This is based on Founders Pledge’s new research (which is — at least right now — not public) and the ~3x GD bar we’re currently using internally for global health and wellbeing charities (but may update before this Giving Season).

We’re going with FP’s recommendations he... (read more)

I don't think one needs to be on a fulltime salary to be in a position to give, e.g. among the surveyed population I would expect many/most of the people who are part-time employed (~12%), self-employed (~11%) and retired (~2%) to be able to do so. The majority of other respondents are students, for which the exceptions I refer to in the post can hold (but I wouldn't be surprised if most of them would be in a position to give >10% as well).

For example, as there are many situations in which starting to give >10% effectively will only trade off with (various levels of) personal comfort and not (in any significant way) with how well you are able to optimise your career for impact.

Yes I was making a weaker claim, along the lines of what Michael says. I don't have a strong view on EAG's admission policy in particular (I think this is a tricky topic with many considerations).

I do however stand by what I say in the recommendations section: "There can be clearer places to go in the EA community for people who give effectively and significantly but aren’t currently in a position to change careers. For example, EA Global could feature more relevant content for them, or be more explicitly career-focused itself to make space for a separate ... (read more)

Thanks Johannes.

I'm also unsure about that and eager to find out, which is part of the reason for writing this post. And if it were to turn out hardly anyone disagrees / none of these claims are controversial, I hope we'll find a way to make the actual role of effective giving in the EA community more aligned with what we think it should be (incl. through interventions like the ones suggested above), because I don't think we're currently there!

I think you got it quite well :). Depending on the system and your particular situation, you could indeed use tax relief on future income/capital gains for donations you would make "from income in earlier years" (as money is fungible), and this could account for a large proportion of the relief you would get on it now.

Thanks for asking these in-depth questions, Stan!

1. The donation distribution statistics do not exclude our top 10 donors (neither on the pledge nor on the non-pledge side), so our takeaways from those aren't influenced. I should also clarify that we do not exclude all top 10 donors (on either the pledge or non-pledge side) from all of our donation estimates that influence the giving multiplier: we only exclude all top 10 pledge donors from our estimates of the value of the pledge (for more detail on how we treated large donors differently and why, see thi

I like that one!

Hi Luis, thank you for writing this up! I think it's a well-written forum post that clarifies important distinctions and makes valuable points, and on a topic that AFAIK is being considered and discussed by many people in the community currently.

I agree with most of your points. In fact, I've come around on one that we previously disagreed on, namely on defining "local priorities research" more restrictively than how many people are currently using it: I now see more of the value of having "local" in LPR clearly refer to the altruistic scope rather than th... (read more)

Ok, sounds good, I've added you to the list; looking forward to what CEARCH will come up with!

Thanks Joel, happy to add CEARCH; just a quick check: are you planning/aiming to publish funding opportunity recommendations this year? (the aim for this list is to really be about publicly available funding opportunities; e.g. it doesn't include Rethink Priorities even though they do related/relevant research)

Thanks David!

• CN is currently omitted on purpose - doesn't fit definition of (self-identified) EA-inspired research or fundraising - but I could see a case for them being included in the near term (had a really good chat with them this week about their plans and potential collaborations with GWWC, coincidentally). I'm happy to be challenged on this of course.
• I'll add Charity Elections as a separate project.

Thanks for the suggestions Nicole!

• I'll add a country column
• Would be happy for the sheet to be embedded on Forum but don't immediately know how to do it and don't think it's a high priority, so if someone wants to do this please lmk :)

Thanks for pointing at this! We'll make sure to ask GW about this at our next point of contact -i.e. whether they think we should recommend SCI/deworming charities given our different bar and their cost-effectiveness analysis - and this may lead us to change the status of these charities.

Hi Jeff, thanks for another helpful suggestion! (previous one) In this case, I agree there is room for improvement, and we'll aim to update our inclusion criteria throughout 2023 and to provide more details where we can. The reasons this particular thing isn't in there yet are (1) we simply haven't prioritised writing this out yet, as it is quite detailed/applies to just one of the four "cause areas" we cover and to just one evaluator (FP) and it would require quite a bit of extra context to explain to the broad audience we try to reach (e.g. laying out w... (read more)

Thanks again for this suggestion Jeff! However, for reasons mostly outlined in my comment here (under (4)) GWWC's position remains that we should not restrict charity recommendations only to those who have a recent public evaluation available. I'd be interested in any more arguments coming out of this discussion that would update our view though, and these could feed into a revision of our inclusion criteria later this year.

There's one thing I'd like to add - based on the emphasis of your new post: as you mention, there are multiple reasons why people choo... (read more)

Yeah agreed. And another one could be as a way of getting involved more closely with a particularly charity when one wants to provide other types of support (advice, connections) in addition to funding. E.g. even though I don't think this should help a lot, I've anecdotally found it helpful to fund individual charities that I advise, because putting my personal donation money on the line motivates me to think even more critically about how the charity could best use its limited resources.

Thanks again for engaging in this discussion so thoughtfully Jeff! These types of comments and suggestions are generally very helpful for us (even if I don't agree with these particular ones).

I think trust is one of the reasons why a donor may or may not decide to give to a fund over a charity, but there are others as well, e.g. a preference for supporting more specific causes or projects. I expect donors with these other reasons (who trust evaluators/fund managers but would still prefer to give to individual charities (as well)) will value charity recommendations in areas for which there are no public and up-to-date evaluations available.

I think what I'd like to see is funds saying something like, if you want to support our work the best thi

FWIW I'm not asking for immediate action, but a reconsideration of the criteria for endorsing a recommendation from a trusted evaluator.

I wasn't suggesting you were, but Simon certainly was. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

In cases where a field has only non-public or stale evaluations then fund managers are still in a position to consider non-public information and the general state of the field, check in with evaluators about what kind of stale the current evaluations are at, etc. And in these cases I think the best you can do is say that this is a field

Thanks for the suggestion Jason, though I hope the longer comment I just posted will clarify why I think this wouldn't be worth doing.

Hi Nathan, I don't think the results of the RCT will be negative, just that they could cause us to update (in either direction) which adds uncertainty, though I'd admit that at a <50% forecast this could plausibly increase my forecast rather than lower it (though this isn't immediately clear; depends on the interactions with the other reasons).

And I hope the more elaborate reply I just wrote to Simon answers your remaining question.

Thanks Jeff, I think your summary is helpful and broadly correct, except for two (somewhat relevant) details:

• GWWC didn't recommend SM based on FP's recommendation in 2019 but based on FP's decision to still recommend SM as of this giving season (which is based on FP's internal re-evaluation of SM).
• I don't expect there to be any new, decision-relevant information in FP's recent internal re-evaluation that isn't captured by the 2019 report + the recent HLI analysis (but I'm not sure about this - Matt can correct me if I'm wrong, though also see his commen

Hi Simon,

I'm back to work and able to reply with a bit more detail now (though also time-constrained as we have a lot of other important work to do this new year :)).

I still do not think any (immediate) action on our part is required. Let me lay out the reasons why:

(1) Our full process and criteria are explained here. As you seem to agree with from your comment above we need clear and simple rules for what is and what isn't included (incl. because we have a very small team and need to prioritize). Currently a very brief summary of these rules/the process... (read more)

As I tried to clarify above, this is not a case of secret info having much - if any - bearing on a recommendation. As far as I'm aware, nearly all decision-relevant information is and has been available publicly, and where it isn't Matt has already begun clarifying things and has offered to provide more context next week (see discussion between him and Simon above). I certainly can't think of any secret info that is influencing GWWC's decision here.

FWIW my personal forecast wouldn't be very far from the current market forecast (probably closer to 30%), not... (read more)

Tbh I think this is a bit unfair: his criticism isn't being disregarded at all. He received a substantial reply from FP's research director Matt Lerner - even while he's on holiday - within a day, and Matt seems very happy to discuss this further when he's back to work.

I should also add that almost all of the relevant work is in fact public, incl. the 2019 report and HLI's analysis this year. I don't think what FP has internally is crucial to interpreting Matt's responses.

I do like the forecasting idea though :).

Edit 03-01-23: I have now replied more elaborately here

Hi Simon, thanks for this post! I'm research director at GWWC, and we really appreciate people engaging with our work like this and scrutinising it.

I'm on holiday currently and won't be able to reply much more in the coming few days, but will check this page again next Tuesday at the latest to see if there's anything more I/the GWWC team need to get back on. 

For now, I'll just very quickly address your two key claims that GWWC shouldn't have recommended StrongMinds as a top-rated charity and that ... (read more)

Thanks for your comment Hendrik!

To address this, I think it's important to look at the value each additional layer of evaluation provides. It seems (with the multitude of evaluators and fundraisers) we are now at a point where at least some work in the second layer is necessary/useful, but I don't think a third layer would currently be justified (with 0-1 organisations active in the second layer).

Another way to see this is: the "turtles all the way down" concern already works for the first layer of evaluators (why do we need one if charities are already ev... (read more)

Thank you both for offering to help! I'm not yet clear on whether it'll make sense to work with volunteers on this, but it is certainly something we'll consider. Could you please indicate your interest by filling out this form? (select "skilled volunteering"-->"impact analysis and evaluation")

Conditional on fundraising for GWWC's 2023 budget, we'll very likely hire an extra researcher to work on this early next year. If this is something you'd be interested in as well, please do feel free to reach out at sjir@givingwhatwecan.org and I'll let you know once the position opens up for applications.

Thank you!

I also think it's worth stressing that the best alternative to finding a great (above-bar) option to spend money on now is not to spend on options below the bar, but to wait / keep looking and spend it at an above-bar opportunity later (and ideally invest to give while you're at it).

In your example, this cashes out (roughly) in us using Research multiple times to find as many Alpha-like projects as possible and fund those, and to only start looking for and funding Beta-like projects when there are no more Alpha-like projects to find. Even if there is only ... (read more)

I would like to push back a bit, as I don't think it's true that scalability per se matters more now than it did in the past.

Instead, I think the availability of more funding has pushed down the cost-effectiveness bar for funding opportunities, thereby "unlocking" some new worthy funding opportunities, including some very scalable ones.

To see this, consider that the added value of discovering/creating any new funding opportunity for the community is roughly given by (not accounting for diminishing returns when spending at bar level):

"value created by addin... (read more)