Replies to Julia Wise on CEA, GiveWell, and Open Phil
In spring 2017 a public argument broke out in the effective altruism community about whether the Centre for Effective Altruism, GiveWell, the Open Philanthropy Project (Open Phil), and Giving What We Can (GWWC) were institutionally too entangled, and whether their marketing was honest about that entanglement. Alyssa was preparing a critical piece for publication; Kelsey Piper (then an EA blogger, later a Vox writer) was editing it. Julia Wise — a GiveWell board member and CEA’s community liaison — had sent back a set of comments defending the orgs. The note below is Alyssa’s point-by-point rebuttal, working through the specific factual claims at issue.
Some responses to Julia’s comments, in no particular order: “10% is a default, not the only possible pledge. The wording of the pledge itself is ‘at least ten percent.’”
To be clear, I’d support a variable-percentage pledge over a fixed-percentage pledge, for many reasons previously discussed. However, in practice, people outside GWWC discussing it do tend to summarize it as “10% for life”, although that arguably might not be GWWC’s fault if they’ve tried hard to clarify ( Aceso Under Glass on the GWWC pledge ). Also, the webpage seemed to accept percentages lower than 10%; I remember trying 1% for example.
“I think representing both of these organizations as ‘run by’ only one person isn’t accurate. GiveWell was founded and run by Holden and Elie since the beginning as co-executive directors.”
That’s not what the website archive says. Although the current pages refer to Elie and Holden as co-executive-directors, the post-mortem of the 2008 astro-turfing incident clearly says that Holden specifically had the executive director title, that he was being demoted from Executive Director to Program Officer as a punishment, and that the position of Executive Director would afterwards be vacant (the organization being run directly by the board), GiveWell’s FAQ on inappropriate marketing . Elie’s LinkedIn page, which I’m guessing hasn’t been updated recently, just lists him as “co-founder” ( Elie Hassenfeld on LinkedIn ). In addition, I think Holden is pretty clearly the public face of the org, has far more Google hits, has a Wikipedia page while Elie does not, and so on.
“After GiveWell and Open Phil split in the next few months…”
I’m not exactly sure what “split” would substantively mean. As of end of 2016, to the best of my knowledge: The same person, Holden Karnofsky, is listed as both “co-executive-director” of GiveWell and “executive director” of OpenPhil ( Open Phil team page ) The same person, Elie Hassenfeld, is listed as both “co-executive-director” of GiveWell ( GiveWell people page ) and “managing director” of OpenPhil GiveWell and OpenPhil use the same office space in San Francisco The majority of OpenPhil grants have gone to GiveWell top charities ( Open Phil grants database ) OpenPhil describes itself on its website as “The Open Philanthropy Project is a collaboration between Good Ventures and GiveWell” ( openphilanthropy.org ) To my memory, GiveWell and OpenPhil have never publicly disagreed on any issue. Even in the case of OpenPhil explicitly deciding to give less money to GiveWell charities, the soon-to-be sole executive director of GiveWell agrees with this decision: “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 ) That’s all in addition to all of the social, cultural, historical, memetic, etc. etc. ties the two orgs have, which we’re kind of stuck with for logistical reasons even if Holden and Elie never spoke again.
The blog post Julia links ( GiveWell as an organization: progress in 2016 and plans for 2017 ) actually makes me raise my estimate of the depth of the linkage between GiveWell and OpenPhil, since it says that OpenPhil is not even legally its own organization yet, which I had simply assumed had already happened several years ago. It also explicitly says: “After the split, there will continue to be some shared staff between the organizations (GiveWell staff will track the time they spend on work for Open Philanthropy and GiveWell will bill Open Philanthropy for the time). We will continue to share office space.”
… presumably for the indefinite future.
“Or is it that money from the Long-Term future fund will displace Open Phil money, freeing up more to go to Open AI? That’s why the fund page says ‘Additionally, there is some chance the fund will intentionally or unintentionally trade off against grants that would have been made by the Open Phil.’”
I mean, well, technically yes, but that’s extremely vague, especially since simulated-me hasn’t seen much about OpenPhil, and especially since OpenPhil publishes a large percentage of its content as chronological blog posts which are hard to sort through. AFAICT the blog post announcing the OpenAI grant was only linked to from the grants database, where it will quickly disappear into the archives ( Open Phil grant to OpenAI ), or from whatever media outlets happened to pick it up at the time. The content of that post appeared to be a strong surprise even to people who have hung around the EA sphere for a while, eg: “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.” ( /r/slatestarcodex comment , this got 35 upvotes) “You’re right that it would be bad for someone to just donate 10% of their income for decades without looking into where they were donating, and we don’t want people to do that.”
I mean, yes, but sources have told me that most people just use the defaults on the sliders, which is a strong suggestion that lots of people are in fact doing exactly that (bar the decades not having happened yet). In terms of publicly visible evidence, the fraction donated to the global poverty fund is 46.3%, which is an extremely close match to the 45% default ( Update on Effective Altruism Funds ). I totally understand the model where of course any reasonable person wouldn’t do that kind of thing, at least not without lots of evaluation and independent research, but that model doesn’t appear to fit the evidence.
“You’ve signed up to donate to the organizations you believe to be most effective at improving the lives of others, with a suggestion to use the EA Funds as a way to do this.”
Again, technically one could say this was true, but all of the emphasis appears to be on donating to GiveWell/OpenPhil, to employees of GiveWell/OpenPhil, or to organizations that work closely with GiveWell/OpenPhil and thereby have their donations funged against GiveWell/OpenPhil donations. The GWWC homepage says “OUR TOP CHARITIES ARE SOME OF THE MOST EFFECTIVE IN THE WORLD. It’s hard to know which charities really make a difference. Our Top Charities have been rigorously evaluated and are backed by the highest standards of evidence.” ( givingwhatwecan.org ). Capitalization is in original, and “EFFECTIVE IN THE WORLD” is in 100-point font. On the flip side, to my knowledge, there’s nothing on the GWWC or CEA websites (or really anywhere else) about personally going out and finding/evaluating charities that fit your desires. There’s some content about general principles like expected marginal utility, and some people have made flowcharts like this one to choose between a small set of well-known charities. But I don’t remember ever reading anything on eg. how to read a charity’s website and documents to decide if they are trustworthy and well-run, except insofar as GiveWell has incidentally done this while recounting their own actions. Indeed, EA Funds is closed off on its own website, which segregates it from the articles on the main website at effectivealtruism.org (although I don’t think this content is on the main website either).