tobytrem

Content Manager @ CEA
523 karmaJoined Jan 2020Working (0-5 years)

Bio

Participation
2

Hello! I'm Toby. I've recently started as Content Manager at CEA, where I will work with Lizka and the Online Team to make sure the Forum is a great place to discuss doing the most good we can. Specifically, you'll see me posting a lot, authoring the EA Newsletter and curating Forum Digests, making moderator comments and decisions, and more. 

Before working at CEA, I studied Philosophy at the University of Warwick, and worked for a couple of years on a range of writing and editing projects within the EA space. Recently I helped run the Amplify Creative Grants program, to encourage more impactful podcasting and YouTube projects. You can find a bit of my own creative output on my blog, and my podcast feed.

Comments
51

Topic Contributions
13

I’ve decided to curate this post. An evaluation of the evaluators, written up by an independent organisation, is a valuable resource for donors and the evaluators themselves. Even though EA charity evaluators are often pretty good at marking their own homework, I’d be happy to see it no longer being a necessity. This project gets up a step closer.

Additionally, I think the response from the evaluated organisations is wonderful. I’d like to highlight ACE’s response which exemplifies truth seeking and collaboration, while pushing back on some of the substance of the report, and making their reasoning clear in doing so.

I'd add that this page of Giving What We Can's website as a good place to look. They act as a hub for the evaluations of several charity evaluators (as well as recently doing their own research on the quality of those evaluators). Giving to one of their funds is one of the best ways to give money to the top charities in a given cause area. 

Hi Akhil. This seems like a great idea! 
To clarify- is this a new fund, or are new charities being added to an existing fund? I couldn't tell from this line: 

I am very excited to announce the addition of several highly impactful charities focused on preventing violence against women and girls to The Life You Can Save’s help women and girls fund, and their all charities fund

Thanks!

I'm starting a thread here for poorly drawn animal rewards. The first is a hedgehog:

Hi Hayven- yes, you're very welcome to post here. 
Thanks for caring about animals and the people around you! 
If you're interested in helping the most animals you can with some of your donations, you may be interested in this recent post from the EA animal welfare fund. Giving What We Can recently evaluated them as a top rated fund for animal welfare, so they are likely to be one of the absolute best places you could donate to help animals. 

The difference in role titles reflects the fact that Lizka is the team lead (of our team of two). From what I understand, the titles needn't make much difference in practice.

PS- I'm presuming there is a disagree react on my above comment because Lizka can in fact do everything at once. Fair enough. 

Thanks for putting these together. This doesn't currently seem obviously bad to me for (I think) the same reasons as Isaac Dunn (those examples don't show valueless reacts, and most cases are much clearer). However, your cases are interesting. 

I agree with your read of the reactions to Ben West's comment. 

In the question about my role, perhaps it is slightly less clear, because "I agree that this is a good question" or "I have this question as well" could probably be adequately expressed with Karma. But I also doubt that this has led to significant confusion. 

In the reaction to your comment, I'd go with the agrees saying that they echo the statement in your tl;dr. The disagree is weirder- perhaps they are signalling disencouragement of your encouraging Lizka's sentiment? 


(Perhaps how perplexing people find agree/disagree reacts to comments which don't straightforwardly contain propositions maps to how habitually the reader decouples propositional content from context.) 


I'll keep an eye out for issues with this- my view is loosely held. Thanks again for raising the issue. 
 

How large is the comparison class for charity evaluators? When you are defining best practice for a charity evaluator, do you have a small set of charity evaluators in mind, or do you find examples in analogous evaluation projects and platforms (perhaps some that are nothing to do with EA, or nothing to do with charity in general)?

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