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Grace Adams

Hello and welcome to our June Newsletter!


This month's major news: We’ve released a 

! This new, redesigned website has been in the works for a long time, and we’re thrilled that it’s live! It will enable us to have a more integrated donation and pledge experience and hopefully brings our new branding to life!

A big thank you to our developers Fabio and Sarah, and designers Alex, Casper and Jasper who put many hours of love into creating a new ‘face’ for Giving What We Can.

Thank you to everyone who gave feedback about our new video introduction format, and also to those who gave additional feedback about our newsletter and how we could improve - we read all of the feedback given to us and use it to inform our strategy.

Based on the feedback, we’ll continue to do a video (and audio) summary for those who’d prefer it and we’ll keep the newsletter the same for those who enjoy reading it.

We will also make an effort to provide some context to some of our news that we include, to make sure that those who are just beginning their journey with effective giving feel supported along their journey (thank you to the one person who left very detailed feedback about this).

June Newsletter Summary


-Luke Freeman & the rest of the Giving What We Can team.

Positive Impact Society Erasmus (PISE)  recently held a pledge party and had 10 people sign a pledge, with some karaoke and a meal afterwards!

We invite you to join us at a special community conversation with Julia Wise to discuss how the funding and goals in effective altruism have been shifting recently and how this impacts our effective giving as individual donors, as well as community health in general. We will ask Julia a bit about her personal reflections on how to best navigate these times and what she thinks some of the issues might be, and then open up to you to ask any questions that you may have for her.

This event will be held in duplicate in order to be more accessible globally:

This month’s meeting will be a social event- Let’s do icebreakers and get to know each other better, let's play games (suggestions are also welcome!). Let's hang out and chat about whatever topics take your fancy! Look forward to seeing you there - Meetups team


 (New York: Sat 6:00 pm, Sydney: Sun 8:00 am)

 (London: 9:30 am, Munich: 10:30 am, Mumbai: 2:00 pm, Singapore: 6:30 pm) CHECK TIMES

Our open forum is an event where you can come along with questions about effective giving or just come along to meet others interested in effective giving. Alternates between different timezones each month.


 (London 12pm, Munich 1:00 pm, Mumbai 4:30 pm, Singapore 7:00pm)

How flawed judgments limit the impact of charitable donations

 - Shakeel Hashim, Giving What We Can blog

 - Vasco Grilo, Giving What We Can blog (Esta história está disponível em português.)

Akhil Bansal | People Who Give Effectively

Our Exec Director Luke was interviewed for a podcast: 

The Opportunity Motivation: Effective Altruism and Our Impetus to Give

 - Luke Freeman and Rachel Mindell, Impact Audio

Centre for Effective Altruism is hiring for a 

High Impact Professionals have launched a 

new directory for professional and workplace groups

, so you can connect with other people in your industry or workplace about effective altruism

 on effective altruism called “What if we all learned how to best help the world?”, from the founder and president of 

Want to try your hand at effective altruism style research on promising causes?

. They are offering hundreds of prizes for research on:

New causes they could fund, with the aim of improving health and economic outcomes

Key questions in cause prioritisation. (For example: What are the most important and addressable sources of pollution in low- and middle-income countries?)

Submissions are due by Thursday, August 4

They'd love to see ideas from experts and amateurs alike — almost anyone can apply! See the 

 for details, or contact hello@causeexplorationprizes.com with any questions.

If you have an idea or project that you think could have a big positive impact on the future of the world, Clearer Thinking would love you to 

“How does producing advocacy research affect the animal advocacy movement?”

 on a $66,400 grant it recommended to WAW Statistical Consulting, Ltd., to continue the development of baggr, a Bayesian statistical package for R.

GiveWell is hiring for several new positions that require no particular academic or work credentials, and could be especially suitable for someone with a nontraditional background. Whatever your background, please consider applying if one of these sounds like a job you'd enjoy, or share these listings with a friend!

GiveWell is also still looking for excellent candidates for its open 

 positions. You can see all open positions on its 

Interested in applying for funding for a wild animal welfare research project? Send

calls for coordinated funding after UK Government pledges to support sustainable proteins

Interested in taking more action to improve animal welfare? Check out The Humane League’s 

Happier Lives Institute and StrongMinds hosted a webinar called Disrupting Charitable Giving, on the value of investing in mental health, and 

Lead Exposure Elimination Project (LEEP), a charity that went through Charity Entrepreneurships incubation program 

“About 200 years ago, the world started getting rich. Why?”

What is progress studies, and how does it relate to safeguarding our long-term future? Garrison Lovely investigates in 

Do we need a better understanding of progress?

 was discussed on the podcast Volts with Johannes Ackva, Senior researcher at Founders Pledge being interviewed by David Roberts

how messaging around climate change impacts youth

If you’re interested or maybe think you might one day be interested in working on safeguarding the long-term future, 

A simple guide to giving effectively

You can now support Giving What We Can’s operations using 

. This funding helps us to inspire donations to high impact charities

 to help grow our community and multiply your impact.

 with Giving What We Can and effective altruism.

Discuss effective giving and effective altruism on the 

 for more news and articles.
Do you have questions about the pledge, Giving What We Can, or effective altruism in general? Check out our 

Our June newsletter covers our new website, news and updates from the effective altruism community.

June Newsletter 2022

Shakeel Hashim

People regularly scoff at the mistakes made by charities. We shake our heads at 

. But what about us, the donors — how can we improve the effectiveness of our choices?

We think we have a responsibility to make sure that when we are using our wealth to change the world, we're doing 

. But our brains aren’t perfect, and we often make mistakes without even realising it. So how can we overcome that?

To answer this question, there's a lot to learn from Nobel prize winning economist Daniel Kahneman. Throughout his career — most notably in his best-selling book 

 — he’s demonstrated that our brains aren’t always good at making the right choices. As he explains it, our brains often make decisions rapidly. That’s a very useful skill! But occasionally, when making those rapid judgments, our brains can easily make mistakes.

Try solving this puzzle without a pen and paper to see what we mean:

A bat and ball cost $1.10. The bat costs one dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

You probably immediately thought $0.10. But the actual answer is $0.05 (the bat costs $1.05, so together they’re $1.10).

Kahneman outlines all sorts of similar situations in 

, pointing out the many “cognitive biases” — systematic errors in our thinking — that we suffer from.

These biases can lead us to make bad or illogical decisions in all areas of life, without even realising it. But being aware of them can help us recognise them, so we can make an active decision to think "slow" and overcome them. As Kahneman explains, recognising biases is particularly important when the stakes are high — as is the case in philanthropic giving.

Understanding these biases can sometimes allow you to slow down your thinking, which is a very valuable skill when picking charities to support.

So let’s look at four mistakes people make in their judgments about the world — and in the process, help you to make better giving decisions.

1. We're bad at assessing the scale of problems

In the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in the 1980s, an experiment was conducted that showed a key cognitive bias known as “scope neglect”. People were surveyed about their willingness to pay for nets that would save birds from drowning in oil ponds. Different groups were asked their willingness to pay to save 2,000, 20,000 or 200,000 birds.

You’d think that saving 200,000 birds would be worth much more than saving 2,000 birds. But in fact, on average people said they’d pay $80 to save 2,000 birds, $78 to save 20,000, and $88 to save 200,000. As Kahneman explains, “What the participants reacted to, in all three groups, was a prototype—the awful image of a helpless bird drowning, its feathers soaked in thick oil. The almost complete neglect of quantity in such emotional contexts has been confirmed many times”.

As this experiment demonstrates, we’re sometimes not very good at thinking about sums. We tend to only care about what the experience of an average person (or bird) experiencing a problem is, and ignore how many people (or birds) are 

This can be a real problem for philanthropic giving: it means we are much more responsive to highly emotive charitable appeals regardless of their potential scale, even if our money might do more good targeting less visceral problems that affect many more people. To get around this, many people assess giving opportunities by looking at their 

. Doing this helps us ensure that we’re giving our money to the most impactful causes.

2. We give too much weight to problems we know the most about.

One of the biases Kahneman talks about the most is the "availability bias". This is the idea that when we're trying to assess how frequent something is, we tend to make that judgment based just on how easily examples of it come to mind. Because the amount we 

 about something is often based on its novelty and excitement — as well as who we know and what we pay attention to (rather than how often the thing actually occurs) — this can lead to misconceptions in how prevalent that thing really is.

 where participants were asked whether more people died from tornadoes or asthma, more people picked tornadoes. In fact, asthma causes 20 times more deaths. But because asthma deaths aren't dramatic, they don't get much media coverage — unlike tornadoes, murders and freak accidents — so to most people, asthma seems like a less frequent killer.

The problem goes beyond the media, though. "Personal experiences, pictures, and vivid examples are more available than incidents that happened to others, or mere words, or statistics," Kahneman writes. In the case of philanthropy, that means we might prioritise causes we're personally affected by in the Western world, and neglect problems that we are less aware of, like malaria and vitamin deficiencies.

Once again, being aware of the bias — while not always a perfect solution — can help us become more effective givers. If you remind yourself to pay attention to statistics rather than anecdotes, you might find yourself making better decisions. More importantly, you should remind yourself that there are people (or animals) behind those statistics. If you want to help more people, it often pays to think outside the box, beyond what is happening close to you or what is getting the most attention in the news. (Our list of 

3. We're not good at judging things on their own.

When two things are presented side-by-side, we're good at spotting the differences between them. But when we're asked to evaluate something by itself, we often struggle to call to mind alternatives to compare it to — and this can result in some strange judgments about value. Kahneman highlights an 

People were asked how much they valued two different dictionaries:

Dictionary A was published in 1993, had 10,000 entries, and was in "like new" condition.

Dictionary B was published in 1993, had 20,000 entries, and its condition was "cover torn, otherwise like new".

When shown the dictionary descriptions one by one, they valued A more highly — B's value was presumably diminished by the torn cover. But when shown the two dictionary descriptions at once (known as a "joint evaluation"), people valued B more highly (because it has many more entries than A).

This is a common problem: when we’re asked to evaluate something by itself, we sometimes form quick judgments about what we think is the “right” amount for some value. But when we’re given two options and asked to 

 them, we put in more effort — and come to more logical conclusions.

This is a problem for philanthropy because we often consider donating in a single evaluation setting — we're making a decision whether or not to donate to Charity X, rather than thinking about whether we should donate to Charity X 

 Charity Y. This reliance on single evaluations might lead to bad decisions about where to donate.

Given that money is finite, and we only have so much to give, each time we’re donating we are implicitly 

 donating to all the other options out there. So to make sure that we’re giving effectively,  we should try to do joint evaluations whenever possible, reminding ourselves of the many alternative philanthropic opportunities that exist. Organisations like GiveWell have developed 

, which allow them to compare effectiveness across causes (e.g. comparing an increase in wages to a decrease in disease prevalence).

While the suggestions we've looked at might be handy, they're not foolproof. Kahneman has spent decades studying various cognitive biases, and is more aware of them than most people. And yet even he says "my intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy as it was before I made a study of these issues." Overcoming the biases turns out to be really difficult.

But don't despair. When it comes to philanthropic giving, there's one easy solution: outsource your decision making to the experts. Some organisations, like GiveWell, Animal Charity Evaluators, or Founders Pledge, might be less bias-prone because they can spend more time evaluating charities, oftentimes in far more detail than a single person could reasonably do. They can dedicate time to do thorough research, which they use to develop models like cost-effectiveness analyses.

What's more, Kahneman says that "organisations are better than individuals when it comes to avoiding errors, because they naturally think more slowly and have the power to impose orderly procedures". If you want to make sure your money does as much good as possible, your intuitions may get in the way. That’s normal. But letting a dedicated and well-staffed organisation decide how to give might mean your donations are going to go even further than if you did all the research yourself.

: to start with, you could take a look at 

Read how the learnings from Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking Fast and Slow can be applied to charitiable giving to allow you to make a greater positive impact on the world.

Vasco Grilo

We recently spoke with Vasco Grilo from Portugal. He shared with us his effective giving story, including what motivates him to give and what issues he cares about the most. This story is available in Portuguese below.

Falámos recentemente com o Vasco Grilo de Portugal. Ele partilhou connosco a sua história de doações eficazes, incluindo o que o motiva a doar e quais as questões que mais o preocupam. Esta história está disponível abaixo em português.

Tell us about yourself, what keeps you busy, what makes you tick.

I enjoy contributing to a better world, via my own work, or helping others to do that!

Tell us about your effective giving journey.

I noticed that I had great grades, and was following a somewhat predictable life trajectory of a good citizen, but was not convinced of my actual impact on shaping a better world. By coming across effective altruism, a philosophy and social movement focussed on maximising the good we can do with our careers, money and life decisions, I understood that I actually had a great opportunity to make a difference. One example is via effective donations. I can save a life with a few thousand dollars!

Why do you give? (What motivated you to give originally. What keeps you motivated now.)

I give because I want to see a world full of happiness and prosperity, where every sentient being can enjoy a life without unnecessary pain, and full of good experiences and achievements!

Vasco shares why effective giving is important to him. This post is also available in Portuguese. 

Blog

June Newsletter 2022

How flawed judgments limit the impact of charitable donations

Member Profile: Vasco Grilo

May 2022 Newsletter

Member Profile: Sonia Albrecht

EA Funds donation platform is moving to Giving What We Can

Can one person really make a difference?

April 2022 Newsletter

Is the world getting worse or better?

Why philanthropy isn’t just for billionaires