Burying the lede: Facebook comments on GiveWell’s writeup
Ben Hoffman, an effective-altruism blogger, had published a piece called “Effective altruism is self-recommending” arguing that the movement’s flagship organizations (GiveWell, Open Phil, CEA) were marketing themselves in subtly misleading ways. A long Facebook discussion broke out in his comments. Helen Toner (later of OpenAI board fame, then at Open Phil) and Julia Wise (CEA community liaison and a GiveWell board member) both pushed back on Ben’s framing. Below are three comments Alyssa contributed to that thread, sent along to journalist Kelsey Piper as background for an article Kelsey was writing on the same dispute. The first comment introduces the “burying the lede” framing; the second illustrates how grammar at the sentence level can hide institutional ties; the third quotes a Reddit reaction as evidence of how surprised even informed readers were.
Three Facebook comments by Alyssa on Ben Hoffman’s thread, sent as background.
Comment 1.
Helen Toner, Ben Hoffman: I’d like to bring up one issue that might cause widespread perceptions of deceptive intent, even when there is none. It’s a truism in journalism that information should be arranged in order of importance. At the top of the article is the headline, which is the writer’s guess of what a typical reader will find most surprising. It’s in large bold font, and condensed into a very small number of words. Below that is the first paragraph, which summarizes key facts — “who, what, where, when”. Below that are subsequent paragraphs, which fill in the less important details. Putting the key facts in a bottom paragraph is considered “burying the lede”.
As one example from the OpenPhil website, here are a few sentences from a recent strategic update: “My very tentative, unstable guess is the ‘last dollar’ we will give has higher expected value than gifts to GiveWell’s top charities today. In isolation, this would point to minimizing giving to GiveWell’s top charities. (…) I chose to recommend $50 million in gifts to GiveWell’s top charities, which is similar to the level of giving from the end of last year (not counting an earlier major gift to GiveDirectly). Alexander Berger and Elie Hassenfeld recommended the same level for similar reasons.” ( Open Phil 2016 update ) To me, this seems like an extremely important and surprising fact. According to GiveWell’s 2017 plans post , Elie will shortly become the sole executive director of GiveWell. It also says that “we [GiveWell] believe that strong giving opportunities have surpassed available funding”, and that “we estimate that we left over $100 million worth of very strong opportunities unfilled last year”. It’s very surprising to me that the head of GiveWell would agree with a donation estimate made by someone who thought GiveWell most likely wasn’t the best use of money. It’s like the CEO of Ford driving a Toyota to work, or something like that.
Closing my eyes, and picking a few other bits from that writeup at semi-random, the ones I’ve pulled are: “As reporters followed up on the story, we felt that we ultimately benefited from having a detailed public writeup — as well as from having a large number of other grants in less confusing areas than monetary policy. The latter helped to support the idea that our interest in this area is consistent with our general interest in neglected (and important) opportunities to improve lives.”
“The framework we’ve been using to compare US-focused interventions with interventions targeting global health and development is extremely preliminary, and it may change a lot in the future. Carl Shulman has raised some considerations (all with fairly preliminary analysis) that could bear on the ‘100x’ figure mentioned above (and elaborated in last year’s post), such as the fact that adding economic value to the world as a whole could indirectly help the global poor via its effects on research and development, foreign aid, etc.”
“At the same time, there are some aspects of our work where I think it’s a good idea to be ‘conservative,’ in the sense of avoiding big, irrevocable decisions — particularly the kind that would commit us to highly unusual and potentially regret-prone behavior, and/or might interfere with others’ planning — when we can’t ground them in thoughtful analysis and reasonably stable conclusions.”
Even though these sections are much less surprising, they’re all sort of mixed together with the first section. This means that a reader will take much longer to analyze and process all the content appropriately. If the “buried lede” reflects negatively on the author (at least in the reader’s mind), the reader might infer that the author is deliberately trying to hide it, as with credit card companies that write the bad portions of their agreements in four-point font.
Comment 2.
Ben Hoffman, Helen Toner: another principle that’s important in writing is that people, even smart well-informed people, have short attention spans. It’s therefore important to include key context and related facts immediately around the primary fact. For example, the GiveWell update I posted earlier has this sentence: “In a change from the previous year, Open Philanthropy’s tentative guess is currently that the ‘last dollar’ it will give (from the pool of currently available capital) has higher expected value than gifts to GiveWell’s top charities today, leading it to recommend that Good Ventures cap its giving to GiveWell’s top charities at $50 million in 2016.”
The post obviously isn’t trying to keep secret that GiveWell and OpenPhil are currently the same legal entity, since it explicitly says that a few pages before. However, the grammar of this particular sentence, in isolation, implies that OpenPhil is an unrelated third party. Replacing the nouns with generic terms: “In a change from the previous year, The Smith Group’s tentative guess is currently that the ‘last dollar’ it will give (from the pool of currently available capital) has higher expected value than gifts to our top charities today, leading it to recommend that the Cabot Foundation cap its giving to our top charities at $50 million in 2016.”
I think a person reading that sentence would, by default, assume that the Smith Group is a third party acting against the author’s wishes, and that the author was disappointed to not get more funding. Of course, we know in the abstract that GiveWell and OpenPhil share an office and several staff members (etc.), and that (from the OpenPhil post) the head of GiveWell apparently participated in and approved of the decision. However, I think putting closely related facts far apart can make the same writing appear more deceptive than if they are spaced closely together.
Comment 3.
Ben Hoffman, Helen Toner: regarding miscommunication, the below is a highly-upvoted comment I saw a few days ago on the /r/slatestarcodex subreddit. It’s obviously negative, but I think the key thing is not just the negativity, but the feeling of surprise that the author clearly has. The author is a longtime poster on /r/slatestarcodex, has been around EA for a while, has read Ben’s and Sarah’s blogs and critiqued the content, etc., so we should expect them to be generally well-informed. I think them being so taken aback signals a real problem.
“Holy shit. I guess I haven’t been following this much; I didn’t realize what’s happening at all. The story appears to be that 1) Givewell is closely connected to Open Philanthropy, which calls itself ‘a collaboration between Good Ventures and GiveWell in which we identify outstanding giving opportunities, make grants, follow the results, and publish our findings.’
2) Open Philanthropy gives a large chunk of its money to non-global-aid goals, such as AI risk 3) They gave their largest single donation ever ($30 million) to OpenAI, which already had $1 billion in committed donations 4) The reason for the above donation was to buy the founder of Open Philanthropy a personal seat on the OpenAI board.
[emphasis in original] That’s utterly ridiculous. Shame on Open Philanthropy. My estimation of Givewell just went down a bunch. It also doesn’t help that Givewell apparently doesn’t test the impact of its own charity recommendations that thoroughly, as the post seems to argue. (…)
This ‘EA is self-recommending’ essay is the first time I see concrete evidence of something truly bad at the very heart of the EA movement (givewell itself, rather than various smaller spinoffs like ACE).
Taking $30M of money raised for general EA purposes and donating it towards not just AI risk, but an AI charity with $1B already in the pool from other sources, all while giving a personal benefit to the founder — that just seems outrageous to me.”
link to thread Reply by Julia Wise: “Eric Rogstad (I’m on the GiveWell board, but speaking here based on public knowledge, not anything I learned as a board member.)
The ‘last dollar’ referred to is Open Phil’s, not GiveWell’s. It doesn’t seem surprising to me that an organization whose purpose is to find the best-vetted, most evidence-based giving opportunities thinks there are unfunded opportunities in that area, while a project, soon to be a separate organization, that describes itself as ‘open to shorter-term, evidence-backed giving opportunities (such as GiveWell’s top charities) as well as very long-term, high-risk opportunities’ might think that its best opportunities lie in the latter category.
To me it seems totally reasonable for someone involved with both projects to consider that GiveWell has excellent donation opportunities for people who want something with a proven track record, and also that there are more speculative interventions out there that will be excellent donation opportunities for those who favor a higher-risk method.”
Reply to Julia Wise.
Julia Wise: a lot of third parties, though, promote GiveWell recommendations as simply being the “best” or “most effective” or “highest rated” — where people should donate their charity budget, full stop. Because of that, I think it would surprise a lot of people if the head of GiveWell thought that most of a marginal donation dollar shouldn’t go to GiveWell charities. Eg: “Here Are The World’s Most Effective Charities (…) Below is a thoroughly vetted list of the most effective life-saving charities in the world.” ( Deadspin ) “Here Are The Charities You Should Support, According To Data (…) Elie Hassenfeld, one of the group’s co-founders, says their goal is simple: ‘We want to answer the question, where should I give to accomplish the most good?’” ( Huffington Post ) “The charity evaluator uses data to recommend the most effective charities (…) Charity effectiveness evaluator GiveWell has won a lot of fans for its data-driven recommendations about where people should donate to have their money used most effectively. (…) the group adheres to a philanthropic philosophy called ‘effective altruism,’ which means it encourages donors to make investments that do the most quantifiable good per dollar invested.” ( Fast Company ) “The development charity Sightsavers has been rated as one of the seven most effective charities in the world by the US-based charity evaluator GiveWell. (…) GiveWell carries out research into charities it considers promising on an ongoing basis and chooses a handful of organisations every year to which it urges people to donate, claiming them to be the most effective in the world.” ( Third Sector ) “GiveWell understands that spending money on administration can make programs more effective and so this statistic is largely useless at identifying the best charities. GiveWell’s goal is to find the most effective charities” ( jefftk.com ) “These are the charities where your money will do the most good” ( Vox ) “What are the best charities in Australia to donate to?” ( mcntyr.com )