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Update to our recommended Global Health and Development charities

has announced a change to their list of top charities

 to list charities that they believe have highly cost-effective marginal funding opportunities, and also have high confidence that funding will result in significant impact.

They are also introducing a new fund, the 

, that will support exciting opportunities outside of their 

. We intend to support this new fund and make it available through Giving What We Can in the coming weeks.


GiveWell is currently our primary evaluation partner for our 

Giving What We Can’s charity inclusion criteria

 the charities that no longer meet GiveWell’s Top Charity criteria will now become 

, which means you can still donate to them via the 

We are excited to have a new Director of Research, Sjir Hoeijmakers, joining our team in August and we plan to review our evaluation and inclusion criteria in the coming months.

As we review and make any changes to our evaluation process or inclusion criteria, we will communicate to our members and donors.

At Giving What We Can, we are excited to see new options to support organisations that aim to most effectively improve the lives of others, like GiveWell’s All Grants Fund.

We also recognise the enormous opportunity there is to improve the lives of others through giving effectively, and we hope our community is excited to continue with us on this path.

GiveDirectly have shared an update in response to GiveWell's annoucement - 

Why giving directly still means giving well

A Change in Designation, Not Evaluation: Deworm the World and GiveWell’s Top Charity Updates

Luke Freeman

Joey Savoie: Making it easier for great charities to exist

In this interview, we chat to Joey Savoie, CEO and co-founder of Charity Entrepreneurship, an incubator that helps launch high-impact nonprofits by connecting entrepreneurs with effective ideas, training, and funding. Joey provides an overview of Charity Entrepreneurship and the problems they're working to solve; he also shares his thoughts on the charity sector, the concept of efficacy, and the role altruism plays in his life.

 has helped launch 18 impactful nonprofits, which have reached over 5 million humans and improved the lives of 1.2 million animals.

You can donate to Charity Entrepreneurship via Giving What We Can.

00:00 - Introduction to Joey and Charity Entrepreneurship

01:04 - The story behind Charity Entrepreneurship's founding

04:21 - Projects Charity Entrepreneurship has helped launch

07:05 - Cause areas Charity Entrepreneurship focuses on

08:48 - Charity Entrepreneurship's core propositions, benefits, and why donors might be interested in supporting the org

12:52 - What value can smaller donors bring to philanthropy?

15:29 - Joey's pitch that "efficacy" in charity can be evaluated, measured, and aimed for

17:39 - Some surprising realizations about the charitable sector

24:50 - What mistakes do people make when thinking about the concept of effectiveness, especially at first?

26:38 - Joey's relationship with altruism

28:07 - How would Joey spend a billion dollars?

Videographer and video editor: Andy Brice

Adam Steinberg 

Using expected value when donating to charity — and day-to-day

If only we never had to make any choices. How easy, stress-free, and wonderfully 

 life would be. What’s for dinner? Whatever’s closest at hand. Where to invest my savings? Leave the money wherever it is and hope for the best.

But part of the condition of being a human adult is the need to make countless decisions, large and small, hoping always to choose the option with the most satisfying or beneficial outcome — or on occasion, the one that’s the “least worst.”

We make few of these decisions with complete knowledge about how our choice will turn out. We may be missing crucial information, or the decision may rely on elements that are unpredictable — like the weather or others’ behaviour.

When even the most momentary of choices, like what clothes to put on in the morning, can involve juggling a host of considerations (the aforementioned weather, your plans, your mood, what matches what…), the complexity and uncertainty of truly impactful decisions, like choosing a career or how to navigate a difficult personal relationship, can seem monumental.

In the face of so much uncertainty, how do we avoid simply curling up under the bed and never coming out? Here’s the marvel: Even with all the noise, we are nearly always able to make a choice, and often, it works out okay. This is because — likely, without even knowing it — we are applying the concept of 

Expected value is a method of deciding among options that considers what positive and negative outcomes are possible, and weighs these so that more likely outcomes have a stronger influence on the decision. In simplest mathematical terms, this is “the probability multiplied by the value of each outcome.”

Whether choosing a house or choosing a sandwich, we ask, in short, 

Am I satisfied that the potential benefits, especially the most likely ones, outweigh the potential downsides, ditto?

In everyday life, we might base our conclusion on vague speculations of what success or failure might look like. However, if you can quantify potential outcomes in some way, you can actually estimate what the best decision might be, using mathematics.

Let’s look at an example, albeit not one you should necessarily try at home.

 of regular commuters in the New York subway save a lot of money by jumping the turnstile. It’s not that they never get caught; it’s that they know they’ll be caught rarely enough that, in the long run, they’ll save more by paying fines than if they bought tickets. In fact, in 2011 a 

 showed regular jumpers were only caught about once every 6 to 13 weeks. Let’s do the (rough) math:

The fine for this violation is now (and was then) $100. A current weekly ticket costs $33. So, with minimal math, you might calculate in your head that even with the risk of being caught, a person caught after six weeks would save money since they did not pay for tickets in that time. Since 6 weeks x $33 = $198, they are already ahead of the $100 fine by $98. Even if policing has improved since 2011 and they get caught once every four weeks, they’d still be ahead.

We’ve set aside important moral implications of this act, not to mention harms to the subway’s system’s revenues and resulting effects on commuters. But sticking to mathematics, expected value shows a benefit over time (For a precise breakdown, see "

Expected value can make other decisions better

What’s pretty cool is that expected value has much broader implications on your decision-making than just whether or not to 

. Statistically speaking, if you make appropriate decisions consistently based on expected value—where you are able to assign numerical values to the severity and likelihood of different outcomes—in the 

 you’re guaranteed to do better than any alternative approach.

That’s why expected value, expressed as a formula, is used in statistics and economics, as well as heavily in pursuits like gambling, investing, planning a lottery, and determining insurance premiums. Experts in these particular sectors have developed methods to assign numerical values, as described, to many or all possible outcomes, and they therefore can use rather simple mathematics to determine what risks will be most likely to turn a profit over time.

Of course, we can't overlook the "expected" part of "expected value." If you calculate the expected value of an action and end up with a positive result, this doesn't mean the action will be beneficial in every case. 

 understand well that on any given day, they may win or lose, but over time, actions with positive expected value are 

 to see more success than failure. In a repeated course of action—like betting—the more (and more accurately) we apply expected value and choose to do what’s best 

 the more likely the results will begin to show the calculated tendency towards positive or negative.

I’d wager that most people who skip the subway fare do no more than the abbreviated guesstimate in the example above. Many just base their decision on past experience, observation, or gut feeling. But they 

 do the full calculation and determine the expected value more precisely. It might look like this:

Make the negative result a negative number and add these together:

The result is negative, meaning there is some cost. Over time, you might expect to pay an average of $1.60 a ride if you get caught once every six weeks. But that’s a lot less than a weekly pass at $3.30 per ride!

(For more detailed looks at how concept works, especially from a mathematical perspective, check out 

 that looks at using expected value in real-life situations, or learn about how it applies to buying a 

Expected value allows us to apply a reasonable set of guidelines to somewhat complex decisions and aim for the best outcome. Clearly, then, expected value can be instrumental in making decisions about how best to help others.

If you want to determine (over the long term) how to do the most good with the resources available, or what causes will have the greatest impact, expected value is an important tool. Indeed, such is the project of effective altruism. The Effective Altruism Forum offers 

 of an expected value calculation around social impact:

Imagine you're choosing between two medical interventions. The first intervention is a drug that succeeds in 60% of cases, and that gives an extra year of healthy life when it succeeds, and has no impact if it fails.

In the case of this drug, there are only two outcomes: success and failure. So the expected value is:

(1 year of life × 60%) + (0 years of life ×40%) = 0.6 expected years of life

Suppose another drug succeeds with a 40% probability, and gives two years of healthy life when it succeeds, but causes harm equal to half a year of healthy life lost when it fails.

Then the expected benefit of this project is:

(2 years of life × 40%)−(0.5 years of life × 60%) = 0.5 expected years of life

Over many cases, the first drug will likely provide more years of healthy life than the second. So if they cost the same, funding the first drug would add more healthy years of life on average.

, more and more attention is being paid to 

 the expected value of interventions to determine which have the greatest impact in the long term.

Of course, calculating impact is complex, especially since we can’t always rely on precise numerical calculations. Effective-giving groups that make decisions about where to direct resources are the first to 

 uncertainty in their calculations and to explain their level of confidence in their conclusions. In certain cases, hard data may not yet have been scientifically generated, and some interventions simply aren’t easy to quantify numerically. Just consider the difficulty of calculating the impact of wearing masks during the COVID-19 pandemic; it’s very difficult to say with any certainty how many lives were saved. Or consider how to measure the effects of a long-term political effort: There are so many players and external factors that quantifying the effect of your particular work on the issue is impossible.

precisely what makes the concept of expected value so important. 

In the absence of hard numbers, we can still use this tool to favor choices that tend towards success, over time.

To allow expected value to be gauged even in situations of uncertainty, effective altruists have developed heuristics — thinking strategies — that break down the idea of expectation into distinct categories. The most well known of these is the framework represented by 

Such strategies still make use of available evidence, but also bridge gaps in the data by applying careful reasoning, supported by cause-and-effect evidence, about possible courses of action. In this way, expected value helps us avoid situations where we might rely on pure chance or be swayed by moving appeals (sad-eyed puppies?), alarming images, or personal predispositions. This guides us towards interventions that are objectively

The video below explains how the impact, neglectedness, and tractability framework can help you choose a cause to focus on!

Choosing a Cause

Expected value also reveals “hidden” value

There are other, more subtle benefits of using expected value in giving decisions. First, it allows us to look with objective eyes at interventions that seem to have a small chance of success. The organisation 80,000 Hours 

 that donors tend to neglect riskier or more innovative options that can’t yet point to a track record, even if they have great potential.

This is the basis for an approach in altruism called 

. If the potential impact of a charity’s approach is high enough, it might be that it’s worth funding even if its chances for success are slim — merely because the potential positive outcome is so enormous. An oft-cited example: Norman Rockefeller invested in Norman Borlaug’s somewhat unlikely research into agricultural productivity, and Borlaug's work led to the development of high-yielding wheat strains that have brought millions of people out of hunger.

Investing — thoughtfully — in possibly risky but promising interventions can, over time, lead to a few huge breakthroughs — programs which expected value revealed ahead of time to have strong potential. A simplified 

 a $1 million grant with a 99% chance of having no effect and a 1% chance of preventing 50,000 premature deaths, has the same base expected value as a $1 million grant with a 100% chance of preventing 500 premature deaths. Despite the higher risk, if one follows expected value, the former example arguably is as worthy to fund as the latter.

Likewise, in forcing a long-term perspective, expected value can lead us to look further into the future and acknowledge the value “hidden” there — potential benefits over the horizon that may need to be recognized when setting priorities.

Finally, even if a particular calculation of expected value leads to a less-than-desired outcome, the process of using it regularly as we struggle with decisions around giving or otherwise forces a rigour and reflection that itself can make our decision-making more effective. The deliberative nature of the process may allow us to see factors we would otherwise miss.

All this is why expected value is so crucial in decisions about giving, just as in the most important 

. The stakes are high as we decide where our effort or dollars can alleviate the most suffering or save the most lives. Taking the time to use the available tools to look for the most promising expected value might mean the difference between saving an additional life, and not.

Of course, in life we can’t be expected, nor do we have the time, to apply expected value to every decision. We must rely on mental shortcuts, estimates, and even gut feelings to get through our decision-filled days.

But where it matters, in the aggregate and over the long term, expected value builds a rough framework of rationality over our otherwise slapdash decisions. While nothing is certain, if we follow expected value in our lives and in our giving decisions, we will win more than we lose, we will shuffle — even if sometimes haltingly — towards happiness, and we will bend the curve towards the world we want to see.

What is expected value and how can we use it to help bend the curve towards the world we want to see?

Michael Townsend

What We Owe The Future: A review and summary of what I learned

 has just been released in the US and will be available in the UK from September 1. You might already be turning to book reviews or podcasts to inform whether you should buy a copy. To help, I’m writing a quick summary of the book, the three new insights I gained, and the three questions it left me asking.

But it’s worth being upfront to the reader about where I sit. MacAskill entwines rigorous arguments with compelling metaphors to promote a profoundly important idea: we can make the future go better, and we should. It’s filled with rich, relevant and persuasive historical examples, grounding his philosophical arguments in the real world. It’s a book for people who are curious to learn, but also motivated to act — I strongly recommend it.

, the view that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time. The overarching argument is simple:

The future could be enormously valuable (or terrible).

We can positively influence the long-term future.

The book argues for the first claim at the outset in straightforward and intuitive terms, but MacAskill also takes the reader through rigorous arguments grappling with 

, the area of philosophy that focuses on these sorts of questions.

2. The future could be enormously valuable (or terrible)

MacAskill’s argument for the second claim is that there are far more people who could potentially live in the future than have ever lived in the past. On certain assumptions about the average future population and expected lifespan of the human species, the number of people who could live in the future dramatically outweighs the number of people who have ever lived. This kind of analysis may have inspired Our World In Data’s 

visualisation of how vast the long-term future could be

The Last Human — A Glimpse Into The Far Future

” which evocatively draws out the potential magnitude of our long-term future. A substantial amount is at stake: if the future goes well, it could be enormously valuable, but if it doesn’t, it could be 

3. We can positively influence the long-term future

The third claim is the central focus of the book. MacAskill aims not just to argue that we can

influence the long-term future (which is the standard of most philosophical arguments) but that 

(the standard for those who want to take action). MacAskill argues that one of the best ways to focus on the long-term future is to reduce our risk of extinction. Though he also argues that it’s not just about 

we survive. The case for focusing on the ways we can improve the quality of the long-term future is one of the key lessons I took from the book.

Much of what I read was new to me, even as someone who’s been highly engaged with these ideas. If I were to list all the historical examples that were new to me, I’d essentially be rewriting the book. Instead, here are the top three lessons I learned.

Lesson one: Today’s values could have easily been different.

One of the book’s key ideas is that if we could re-run history again, it’s unlikely we’d end up with the same values — instead, they’re 

. This is not something I believed before reading the book.

If I can make a personal confession: I’m a (perhaps naive) supporter of a philosophical view called 

, which claims the best actions are those that increase the total amount of experienced 

 Before reading this book, I hadn’t thought much about whether the values prevalent today were historically contingent. Instead, somewhat smugly, I assumed that there’d been a more-or-less consistent trend over time toward my favourite view (I say smugly because I thought the explanation of this trend was simple: my favourite view is 

MacAskill develops a new conceptual framework to help address the question of whether our values are historically contingent, and he applies this framework to several historical case studies. The most fascinating — and horrifying — is his argument that the abolition of slavery was highly contingent. Before I read the book, I thought the abolition of slavery was inevitable. I reasoned that slavery was so obviously appalling that, eventually, humanity would have abolished it. I now think we’re extremely fortunate and indebted to all those people who managed to (

) end it. Without them, I’m now convinced that there’s a disturbingly high chance it would have continued to this day.

The contingency of our values has important implications for people motivated by longtermism.

One of the most straightforward ways we could ruin the long-term future of humanity is if we end it. That’s why longtermists generally focus on threats to our continued survival, such as those coming from 

compliments this work with its coverage of these risks. I was generally quite familiar with these ideas, but what I was less familiar with — and what I see as MacAskill’s novel contribution — is how to think about other ways we can improve the long-term future.

MacAskill develops his idea that values have been 

contingent into the idea that civilisation’s 

may be determined by how we act today. And given how many people who might be guided by these values, getting them right matters. MacAskill’s conclusion is that we ought to build “a morally exploratory world” — I’ll walk through some of the steps he takes to arrive there, and say more about what that means.

Key to this argument is one of MacAskill’s sustained metaphors: the moral views that shape society are like molten glass. While hot, glass is highly malleable and can easily be blown into a variety of shapes. But it doesn’t stay hot for long, and once it cools, it sets. Just like glass, MacAskill suggests that societies often have periods of great plasticity, where the dominant moral view could easily change, but subsequently, a 

event occurs, causing whatever the dominant value system is to persist for an extremely long time — just like the glass sets once cooled. 

 in China, and the tumultuous beginnings (but long-lasting prevalence) of many religious beliefs and practices, as examples of this trend.

MacAskill argues that we are in one of these unusually plastic times where the glass is molten. Yet, even if you think society is far more moral than it has ever been, we should be fearful of the glass setting:

It is extraordinarily unlikely that, of all generations across time, we are the first ones to have gotten it completely correct. The values you or I endorse are probably far from the best ones.

Given this, MacAskill suggests we build “a morally exploratory world” allowing us to make moral progress before any lock-in event occurs. MacAskill accompanies this with several suggestions, such as promoting conservation efforts, experimenting with different political structures like 

, and upholding certain forms of free speech that facilitate good-faith debate.

I found reading through these arguments exhilarating. How we can positively influence the long-term future is something I’ve been interested in for many years, but this part of the book provided me with conceptual frameworks and historical context that were completely new to me.

Lesson three: Longtermism can be intuitive and compelling

, I became extremely motivated to improve the long-term future. In this article, Bostrom argues that, even though speeding up how long it takes us to colonise the galaxy by a second could result in a further 10^29 lives, it’s dwarfed by the value of even tiny reductions in existential risk. The conclusion is simple: we should reduce existential risk.

I think this is an important argument, and sits among other arguments that lay the foundation for longtermism. But though Bostrom’s argument was compelling to me, it is not compelling to everyone. In the early days, this made me think that longtermism was an inherently niche idea, unlikely to be widely adopted — or even discussed — by the broader community. Though over the last few years I’ve been changing my mind on this issue, after reading 

Though the idea of astronomical waste supports longtermism as an idea, longtermism does not require it. MacAskill’s case for longtermism does not require that we believe we might colonise the galaxy, only that the future is big. It does not focus on reducing existential risk in the abstract, but instead points to specific work being done, and tangible actions that readers can take. This is not a slight to the kinds of arguments that initially convinced me of longtermism: MacAskill was able to write this book in this way by using the foundation early longtermists built, and pointing to the work they inspired.

Blog

Update to our recommended Global Health and Development charities

Joey Savoie: Making it easier for great charities to exist

Using expected value when donating to charity — and day-to-day

What We Owe The Future: A review and summary of what I learned

Simran Dhaliwal: Funding projects to save future generations at Longview Philanthropy

Member Profile: Peter Jensen

Member Profile: Rupal Ismin

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