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Siyi Hao

Deworm The World: an investment in global development

Deworm the World (DtW) delivers school-based deworming treatment to over 37 million children in 27 countries worldwide. It is one of our recommended charities, and is listed under 'opportunities for leverage'. In this post we recap on DtW as they shift their geographical focus towards India.

Parasitic worms pose one of the most serious health and development problems for underdeveloped nations, as they put millions at risk of reduced health and productivity. However, through DtW the outlook for relief and development is very optimistic. Indeed, it is estimated that school absenteeism could be reduced by 25% and adult earnings can be increased by 20% by effective deworming.

In terms of their approach, DtW's targeting of schools makes them a particularly effective organisation. Teachers are given training in deworming, and pupils receive treatment in school. In this way, their work touches the lives of a far greater number of children, as there are far more schools and teachers than there are clinics and doctors.

According to a GiveWell talk with DtW's Alix Zwane, the organisation will focus increasingly on India, and reduce its work in Africa to mainly that in Kenya. At the moment, DtW operates in three areas in Bihar, Rajasthan and Delhi in India. It offered treatments to 40 million children in India last year, and is looking to offer the same to 100 million more. DtW already has the funding for around 60-70% of that number, but now needs funding to cover the rest. In Kenya, DtW already has funding for the operation through 2015-16, and the government has been supportive towards DtW's work.

 by Giving What We Can for several reasons. First of all, it is one of very few charities which focus on neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), another donor-fundable charity Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI) being a further rare example. Secondly, it has experienced staff who are responsive to evidence. Moreover, in the case of DtW, governments bear most of the cost of treatment, and so they may be able to leverage that spending for a larger impact.

In Bihar, India, the local government is hoping to undertake the next round of deworming in September this year. DtW's Karen Levy told us that DtW is pledging for a new round of funding in order to keep up the success of the deworming program in Bihar. A donation to GtW therefore offers a rare opportunity to fund effective development as well as targeted relief. 

 and your money will contribute to a programme that is genuinely able to count lives improved in the millions rather thousands.

Roxanne Heston

What if Nate Silver ran a charity evaluator?

As we enthusiastically announced in April, Giving What We Can has partnered with 

, “a new organization which does meta-analyses of impact evaluations on charitable interventions.” (1) But what exactly are these meta-analyses and impact evaluations? What role can AidGrade play in improving Giving What We Can and, conversely, what can they gain from us? Miguel Almunia, one of the founding researchers of the organisation, offers some insight into the formation, work and goals of AidGrade and how their aims coincide with ours.

Founder Eva Vivalt formed AidGrade when she graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with an Economics Ph.D. in 2011. (2) Working at the World Bank, Vivalt saw the utility of an organisation that would quantitatively evaluate the effectiveness of charitable initiatives, an idea she had harbored since 2004. Finding interested parties at both her university and her work, Vivalt involved classmates and professionals alike in the project, adding, among others, Willa Friedman and Miguel Almunia to her team. AidGrade has since added members from other institutions, such as three new staff members from the Washington, D.C area. (3)

AidGrade’s approach is to take the data of numerous studies and draw comprehensive conclusions by combining their results. Almunia describes their methodology as an “agnostic approach,” meaning that the researchers are willing to look at any study that might demonstrate a correlation between programme and a particular outcome. Currently, AidGrade is putting its efforts into the first half of the 40 programmes it intends to evaluate, and has the first ten - bed nets, microfinance, etc. – already accessible on the site.

In order to give potential donors information about what is most likely to have an impact, AidGrade works to obtain access to all existing studies related to the given areas. To improve the validity of the results, the researchers have a preference for quantitative studies, although some qualitative ones can be incorporated if they were rigorously executed. They then perform a meta-analysis to combine the studies’ results. (3)

The numerous studies conducted are, of course, not identical; each has its own set of variables such as trial length or programme size. The researchers collect these kinds of variables so the papers can be divided into subsets according to what one wants to look at. But how, then, do they make sense of the data without simply totaling the number of studies that found a positive effect, or “vote counting”? Almunia offers Nate Silver, publisher of the New York Times’ 

 election prediction blog, as a model example. (4) Before the election, Silver did not just compile the numerous polls by tallying the number that put the Democratic or Republican Party in the lead, but instead gave each poll a weight based on its previous strength and current sample size. By doing a statistical evaluation of each poll relative to the entire body of polls, Silver – or in AidGrade’s case, the researchers - can then calculate a more accurate representation of the result and their margin of error. Although it is difficult to guide people towards the “right” target issues, AidGrade hopes to give informed advice on which interventions work within each area.

Based on this description, how is AidGrade any different from GiveWell? If their goals are both to evaluate for effectiveness, why not merge? Almunia sees the purposes of the two as distinct. Part of the motivation to set up AidGrade, he says, was that they saw the limitations in the way GiveWell operates with a seeming emphasis on inciting interest. Instead of recommending certain organisations like GiveWell does, AidGrade focuses more on general intervention types and producing rigorous data to back their results. While some may see them as competitors, Almunia believes donors view them as complementary.

Almunia recognises that a problem in academic research is that researchers do not often explain their findings well enough to the public, when he feels they should be generally accessible. He hopes AidGrade can offer an improvement on this through their website, which has a tool that allows people to analyse the data. AidGrade is also in touch with other academics, large international organisations, and non-profits that they see as complementary to their work. While Almunia “can’t say whether people are paying attention or not” to their findings yet, he notes that the “development community has demand for this kind of research” and will continue to work toward that end.

Giving What We Can and AidGrade are pleased to have formed this partnership, sharing mutual interests in helping people choose how to be most effective through investments in personal education and efforts in developing regions. Almunia is excited by the opportunity to disseminate results and influence those who want to donate. “When I told people who are interested in development, both academically and as practitioners, everyone was excited; they saw it as something that was missing and they were glad we were doing it.” (3)

Hutchinson, Michelle. "Giving What We Can: April 2013." Message to the author. 1 Apr. 2013. E-mail.

"Who We Are." AidGrade. N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Apr. 2013.

Almunia, Miguel. Personal interview. 15 Apr. 2013.

Silver, Nate. "FiveThirtyEight to Partner with New York Times." FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right. N.p., 3 June 2010. Web. 10 June 2013.

Yuan Yang

How to present statistics to donors (Part III: International Dollars vs Real Dollars)

 program ("Choosing Interventions that are Cost-Effective") presents DALYs saved per international dollar - most commonly the "Geary-Khamis" dollar. In short, an international dollar is an imaginary unit of currency that has the equivalent purchasing power parity of a US Dollar at some specified date. For example, a 2000 Geary-Khamis dollar is a unit of currency that buys you as many goods and services as a US dollar would have bought you in the US in the year 2000.

The WHO uses the Geary-Khamis dollar because it is an international organisation giving information to a range of donors who use different currencies, who are also choosing between investments in different countries with different goods and price levels; a Geary-Khamis dollar compacts all of the variation in nominal currency and in price level into one measure of real currency, i.e. currency that buys a certain amount of goods and services.

Now, there are many problems with the Geary-Khamis dollar from the point of view of economic theory and international justice. Thomas Pogge and Sanjay Reddy argue (in their paper 

) that the use of international purchasing power metrics such as the Geary-Khamis dollar obscures economic reality and leads one to overweight the importance of aiding some countries over others.

From the point of view of writing about cost-effective charity donation, the take-home message is that Geary-Khamis dollars are fairly complex economic fictions that are not easy for donors to understand. Nobody actually uses Geary-Khamis dollars (apart from, well, people who lived in the US in the year 2000). So it is of no motivational or emotive relevance to say to someone: "You could get that for 40 Geary-Khamis dollars!"

For a general audience we should use real dollars (or pounds, or whatever currency your audience understands), and make sure to either date the currency to a particular year, or adjust your statistics for inflation year upon year. If there are significant purchasing power disparities to take into consideration, you should give the headline statistic first and then explain what the purchasing power disparity does to your cost-effectiveness measure; don't just bundle it into the piece of confusing economic terminology that is the Geary-Khamis dollar.

I have argued that we should take responsibility for the rhetoric we generate when making statistical arguments for cost-effectiveness and moral decision-making. My three key recommendations are:

Write an executive summary highlighting the decisions the desired reader should make;

Present cost-effectiveness data in DALYs/dollar not dollars/DALY - the former is a better frame;

Draw linear graphs - they are clear to understand - and highlight a single comparative message; and

Use real economic metrics, such as US dollars, that are used by people in their daily lives.

Joined us at part three? Check out Yuan's posts on 

Brenton Mayer

The Run to Better Days

The Run to Better Days is a fun example of how members of Giving What We Can in Australia - and their friends - are trying to spread the word about effective altruism. Here, organiser Brenton Mayer explains how the run works and asks how effective it's likely to be.

 we ran 1,200 kilometres in a relay format up the coast of Australia. We raised $27,000 and stopped in along the way to speak at schools, Lions Clubs, Rotary Clubs and universities, presenting to around 10,000 people in total.

"We tried to frame global poverty as an ethically challenging issue which Australians can and should act upon, and we gave away 600 copies of Professor Peter Singer's The Life You Can Save to interested people.

"This year's run will be even bigger and kicks off today!

"Dan Charles started the Run to Better Days four years ago after reading Singer's book in his final year of school, knowing that he wanted to communicate its message to kids in schools in an exciting way. During the run, each runner covers about 10km each in a relay format. Fresh runners are brought by car every few hours, and in this manner we crawl along at roughly 100km a day. Our big not-so-secret secret of course, is that athletically it's not really that impressive, and the point of the run is all about talking to people about poverty.

"This year we have five speaking teams of two people. While the run is happening, they will drive to schools in the vicinity, and give presentations to students in their final two years of school. After this we speak at society meetings (primarily Rotary and Lions Clubs), with an appropriately adjusted pitch with more space for questions at the end, and give away just a couple of books. In my experience these are invariably pleasant evenings where we're made to feel very welcome by club members, and last year we were pleasantly surprised by just how many groups donated generously towards the run. The team members who aren't speaking drive to the accommodation. From there we organise the the next day, monkey around for a bit like groups of 20ish 20ish year olds do, and vote, upon hearing the embarrassing tales of the day, for who should be forced to wear the 'Donkey of the Day' pants for the next 24 hours."

Is the Run to Better Days effective altruism?

The run has been designed to maximise how many people we can get to think seriously about Singer's arguments on poverty. Our presentation starts off by introducing Singer's drowning child thought experiment, covers the basics of what extreme poverty is, compares extreme poverty with our own growing wealth, and then looks how much our society and our government are doing towards poverty alleviation at the moment. We then challenge our listeners with the question of, given all the above, what should we be doing? To help them answer that, we present some of the wonderfully straightforward calculations that show how much people living in developed countries can do for others, examples of which you can find 

"After the talk we suggest that 'if anything we've said has struck a chord or seemed interesting, then the best thing to do is to read this book; The Life You Can Save.' We offer a free copy of the book, as well as a letter, to all who are interested and want to engage more with the ideas, spreading the message about how and why they can improve the world in the best way.

"Last year was the first year we did the run, so this year we have the opportunity to put into practice everything we learned from the operation in its test run, including follow up and keeping track of how many people remained interested. In the absence of that data, here are a couple of points on the way we've designed the The Run to Better Days that I hope point towards it being quite effective:

By speaking at schools we reliably get large audiences for solid lengths of time, with little effort on our behalf relative to the difficulty in procuring other audiences. The basic idea is that we're young people with a little bit of street cred left, and we can say - "Hey kids, social justice is cool!"

Kids in their final years of school are some of the best people to speak to about poverty because they're old enough to follow what you're saying, whilst being open minded and not automatically sceptical.

The Run has allowed us to speak at a huge range of venues, including classes of 800 medical students, 1200 allied health students, and a Masters of Public Health class.

We don't need a large percentage of people to read The Life You Can Save for giving out books to be effective: if 1% of the people who ask for a copy are affected, that makes 15 new people questioning seriously whether we should do a lot more about poverty.

The run ends up being a common topic of discussion, so as a result we are prompted to explain Singer's idea and often have discussions as a result. If you'd like to get an idea of what's in the talk, get in touch as I can send you a low quality podcasted talk. Additionally, we would be happy to give out a transcript and a copy of our visual aids as well, if you'd like to present something similar.

"So, to summarise my answer to 'is the Run to Better Days Effective Altruism?': We're putting in a solid effort to try and make it as effective as possible, and with proper follow up, we will find out for sure this year."

Rob Wiblin

Interview with GiveWell: giving to learn, research methods, and the added value of AMF

Research Director Robert Wiblin interviewed GiveWell co-founder Elie Hassenfeld on a range of issues suggested by volunteers and members of Giving What We Can. This is the second post, which covers when to donate, how GiveWell's research has changed over time, and exactly what the Against Malaria Foundation are doing that makes them GiveWell's number one charity. An unabridged transcript of the interview is available 

RW: Do you think donors should consider waiting a couple more years in the hope that you or someone else will be able to find a significantly more cost effective option that AMF or your other recommendations?

 on a while back, but I think there's a couple of things to think about. I think that if I had to bet, I'd bet that our recommendations three years from now will be better than our recommendations today. I do think there's a couple of pretty important counter-arguments to that and reasons why I personally give to our current recommendations, rather than just waiting around for our recommendations a few years from now. One is I think that it's helpful to become habituated to giving to charity. I think that there's a non-negligible danger of allowing yourself to hold on to the funds and never quite being ready to pull the trigger. Obviously, there's an easy way to deal with that problem, which is using a mechanism like a donor-advised fund where you actually get the money out the door, but you don't select the organisation to which you're giving.

The other factor that I also think is important is giving to learn. By that I mean giving money and then following up with the organisation to find out what happened. You gave the money as a means for improving your understanding about how the charity world works. And this has been one of best learning mechanisms that we have found at GiveWell. It goes back to our recommendation of VillageReach and all of the work we've done to follow them over the years to understand what went well and what went poorly for that organisation. But the same is true for SCI, AMF, GiveDirectly. Following closely on the ground is the way we learn about effectiveness. If everyone were to decide not to give and to hold out, I think the quality of GiveWell's future research would fall because we wouldn't have that opportunity to direct money and learn from how we directed that money.

RW: Related to that, one of our members sent the question "How many charities do you need to investigate in each field before you get confident that you're getting near the best?" I guess I have a similar question: how your recommendations have changed over the last seven years? Have they been getting better or worse and why, and does that inform your best guess as to whether your recommendations will get better or worse in the future?

EH: Let me answer those in turn. The first question was about the number of charities you investigate in a field before feeling confident that you're getting 'near the best'. I don't really think the set number is the right way to think about it. You want to do enough work in a given area that you start to see patterns in the organisations you're finding and you're not surprised by the results that you find. You're not bumping into new organisations, new approaches, new ideas that are things you haven't investigated at all or can't really know how they would match up to our top charities. For us, in the area of global health and development, over the years we've been in business, we've looked into this area sufficiently that we haven't been surprised for a long time at something that's just popped up on the scene, we generally see the same stories popping up over and over again.

I think we have a good sense of the characteristics of an organisation that would make them promising in our process - that they are largely implementing a program that has strong evidence behind it, and is cost-effective, and that they are willing to be transparent. You do those things, that's great. You don't do that, that's less promising. And we've got to the point where we're not just bumping into organisations that have those characteristics that we haven't heard of before. So that means that at this point, with our global health and development organisations, I'm less optimistic that we're going to find new organisations. I know who the next ten contenders are and we're trying to encourage them to engage us, but we also have a very good sense of the lay of the land.

On the second question - of changes over time - I think that our research has become significantly more intense and in-depth, and I do think the recommendations that are on our site now are better in some aggregate sense than the recommendations we made in the past. We went full time in 2007. In our first full-time period, we received grant applications from organisations and we had very little information. We tried to do these very explicit cost-effectiveness calculations for the organisations that applied, and we recommended Population Services International and Partners in Health based on these very explicit cost-effectiveness calculations. With Partners in Health, there was some of the case that was not explicitly quantifiable. All of these archived reviews are available on our website if people are interested in seeing the 2007 version of GiveWell's research.

Our research back then was limited both by the set of organisations that applied, but also our understanding of what we should be looking for. In 2009, we changed our process, we reached out to new organisations, and that's when we recommended Village Reach and Stop TB Partnership as our top organisations. Both Village Reach and Stop TB Partnership are incredibly outstanding organisations, certainly in terms of the programs that they work on, how transparent they are, the quality of people involved in their activities. But they have weaknesses that they have that our current charities do not have.

In the case of Stop TB, we couldn't get compelling information on room for additional funding. What was really going to happen to Stop TB's programs because of additional funding from GiveWell directed donors? At the time of our review, we thought they were going to provide more basic treatments for TB. Back to that learning idea, we were going to follow that up, and we learned later that the funds were not needed for first-line TB drugs - the basic TB treatment. We wrote in the latest review of Stop TB Partnership that we don't have sufficient understanding of room for more funding to recommend this organisation.

Today, our recommendations are ones where the room for more funding - what impact an additional dollar donated to the organisation has - is a major part of what we're focussed on. In the case of Village Reach, we knew that they were taking a riskier approach to development than we had been hoping for when we started looking for top charities. The thing that they didn't have was that really iron-clad evidence-based case that their programs made any difference. I think they had a lot of evidence that it did, but there are also questions that were not answered by the types of data they were able to present, more post-hoc assessments of what occurred, and using some qualitative assessments of the likely causes of changes driven by their programs. AMF, Givedirectly and SCI are all organisations whose programs are informed by multiple Randomized Controlled Trials. This is a standard of evidence that is significantly higher than the standard we held Village Reach's programs to.

In the very big picture, the way I would describe the change in our recommendations over time is that we've become more sensitive to the issues that are most important to investigate deeply and we've significantly increased the depth of our research. I look at GiveWell today, and I think what we've done for global health charities is outstanding, but I also recognise that there are certain types of activities that we have not looked into solely because we haven't had the time yet to get to them. Activities like funding scientific research, or potentially trying to influence government action. These are things that large-scale philanthropists are very involved in.

It seems to me intuitive that they might be significantly more impactful than organisations that provide direct services, and therefore we must look into that. We might not find anything. But my instinct is we'll find things that at least for some donors are significantly more appealing than the organisations that we recommend today. I think that will largely come by broadening the scope of the research we've done to remove the criterion of significant evidence of effectiveness.

RW: You mentioned earlier that it seems like you can both give now to your best charities and support incredibly valuable research into what works. So what kind of research are the charities you recommend - AMF, SCI and Givedirectly - doing? What's a specific project that they're conducting which excites you and is going to produce useful information for GiveWell and others?

EH: Well, AMF is on the ground giving out bednets and then they're tracking what's happening to malaria rates in communities in which they're working. They're tracking net usage and posting it all on their website. They're also intending - though I don't have the specific details into when and how this will play out - to track any evidence of mosquito resistance to insecticide-treated mosquito nets. Obviously they're tracking malaria rates, so that's helpful.

These are the things that if I had never come into contact with the malaria community before, I would have thought these must be tracked - it's obvious - you track malaria rates, track usage, track insecticide resistance, but this data is not readily available. If you look at the page that we published on insecticide-resistance and malaria nets last year, you'll see that there is very limited information out there about this.

AMF is on the ground doing a few things: first, obviously, the malaria nets save lives, but because they are transparently sharing everything that happens on their program, they are helping us understand the challenges of direct provision of nets, they are also collecting and sharing information that I think will help the malaria community more broadly. In the event that AMF gives out nets and malaria rates don't fall, that will certainly be an instance where one will be able to learn a great deal about the circumstances in which nets may not work. So far, malaria rates have fallen significantly since the nets were distributed.

The same is true for GiveDirectly. They are collecting and sharing information about how people use the funds that they receive. GiveDirectly itself is involved with an RCT on the impact of cash transfers and studying cash transfer mechanisms, for example giving to a subset of a village versus giving to every single person in a village.

Giving What We Can Cambridge

Interview with Peter Singer-Part II

give a talk on effective altruism and Giving What We Can at the Cambridge Union.

 took the opportunity to discuss effective altruism and effective careers with Professor Singer.

In the second part of the interview, published below, Singer answers questions on effective careers.

Applying effective altruism to career choices – the idea behind “effective careers”

GWWC: How would you define an effective career?

 An effective career is one in which you seek to make the biggest possible beneficial impact on the world. That would be the most effective career but not many people will reach this. What you see instead is people striving for the most effective career and changing their career choices in order to have a bigger impact, if not the biggest. Overall this is adding another dimension to what effective altruism is all about.

GWWC: Is there a set of stable criteria that identifies a career as effective or good? Or does it differ from person to person? Because ultimately it is very hard to anticipate what impact these big life choices will have. With all that in mind what advice would you give to university students and young people interested in making these decisions?

 The main advice is to think about your career as something you are going to spend a large amount of time and energy on – 80,000 hours – and therefore not just to fall into one career or the other but to make a conscious choice to end up in a career where you can make a significant difference, and expect to get some satisfaction and well-being from doing so. But that’s very general advice, I can’t give advice to students saying either you should become a doctor to go and help people abroad who need health-care, or you should become a scientist so that you can discover renewable energy that doesn’t emit greenhouse gases, or you should go into finance so that you can earn a lot of money and donate to these organisations. That decision is going to depend on the individual’s talent and character. Each individual has to think for himself or herself “what can I contribute and where can I have the greatest impact” and then commit to doing so.

GWWC: In your own academic career and your career as a public figure, you have spent a lot of time persuading other people to be more compassionate. Looking back on all the things you have worked on and the impact you have made, would you go into an academic career again? What are you thoughts about your own impact?

 I think I’ve been very fortunate to have made the choices that I did, without knowing exactly where it would lead. But certainly, I always had some sense that I wanted to affect opinions on what we ought to do and how we ought to live, that was why I became interested in ethics. I was lucky that when I started doing philosophy it was a period of transition as the rather sterile philosophy of linguistic analysis was giving way against the background of issues such as the Vietnam War, racism and sexism to which philosophy needed to be made relevant. That became a climate in which you could once again do applied ethics. Because it was a fairly new field it was possible for me to do more and to have a bigger influence with articles such as “Famine, Affluence and Morality”.

GWWC: Do you think there is a way in which the idea of effective altruism as an investment banker is just fundamentally at odds with conventional ideas of morality, where it is about what I myself do and not necessarily about consequences for everyone else?

 Well, you’re seen in some circles as an immoral person as a banker. Maybe this is the predominant view among students but I don’t think that’s the general view. And that may also be something where there is a difference between UK and the US, where there is generally a more positive view of capitalism and money, so that Americans see altruism and banking as less of a conflict. But I agree, it will take a real shift and in a way you have to grasp the argument that Will Crouch has put forward: if you don’t become an aid worker, someone almost as good as you will, and will have almost the same impact as you, whereas if you don’t become an investment banker someone else will and will probably do pretty much the same bad – or lets just say morally dubious thing – as you, but they won’t have given a significant portion of their income to charity, which you would have.

GWWC: What do you think are the questions that are still open in this field, in terms of moral responsibility, effective careers, effective giving and tying all these concepts together?

 So I think there are still a lot of open questions regarding what things we ought to be working on. We’ve been talking about effectiveness, and I guess we have some background assumptions that we’re trying to reduce global poverty, but even within that area there are different things that we could do. There are things like getting bed nets out to kids so they don’t get malaria, that’s pretty straightforward. There’s things like trying to change the global economic order, the World Trade Organization or the way in which the US and Europe subsidise their agricultural products which is disadvantageous for developing countries. So there’s that more political route, and there’s things like working with climate change in the long run. So I think those questions are still quite open. And then I think there are reasonable questions that should be raised as to whether global poverty is the issue that we should be focused on. Some people think that existential risk – a risk of something causing the extinction of our species – is an issue we are neglecting the opportunity to reduce the odds of. And even if we reduced them quite slightly, taking into account the long future of the species and all that might be achieved and realised if we survive for the next couple of centuries some people think that’s a more important issue to work on than global poverty. And some people, and indeed I, think, that animal suffering is a very important and relatively easily preventable form of suffering. So you can debate whether if you are interested in reducing suffering with a limited amount of resources those could be used more effectively in eliminating global poverty or trying to persuade more people to be vegetarian or vegan so that there’s less animal suffering, and fewer greenhouse gas emission. So there are a number of different strategies within each cause and there are a number of different causes – this is a debate that needs to be pursued.

GWWC: To wrap up – what are your next steps?

 Currently I am working on transforming a series of lectures on effective altruism I gave at Yale into a book-length manuscript. Also I am working with 

, which is an organization in some respects parallel with Giving What We Can - we work closely together. The aim is to spread the idea that to live an ethical life you should give a significant portion of your income to alleviating poverty.

You can read more about effective careers-and whether it's better to be a banker or an aid worker-on 

This is a slightly compressed and edited version of the original interview.

Thanks to Sophie Hermanns, Luke Ilott, and others for leading the interview and Markus Anderljung for transcribing the interview!

How to present statistics to donors (Part II: Representation)

Although we are familiar with the idea of criticising journalists for using misleading language in their verbal rhetoric, we are not as quick to point to the use of misleading data representation in statistical rhetoric, which is often non-verbal and highly visual. Graphs give a writer the opportunity to present statistics clearly, but also the opportunity to be confusing in two dimensions and multiple colours.

In a second post on on the importance of conveying information persuasively when discussing moral issues, Yuan gives her recommendations on representing data in graphs in an easily understandable way and on minimising the 'lie factor'.

Watch this space for Yuan's third post in this series where she'll wade into the international Dollar vs real Dollar debate.

Graphs give a writer the opportunity to present statistics clearly, but also the opportunity to be confusing in two dimensions and multiple colours.Representing numbers visually is much more arresting than presenting statistics numerically - so long as the graphics are easy to correctly interpret.

A common mistake among those graphing cost effectiveness data is to present differences on a logarithmic scale. This compresses differences in cost effectiveness of ten, a hundred or a thousand-fold into apparent visual differences of just two, three or four-fold. A good example is the linked figure on 

 from the Poverty Action Lab. While the true variation may be understood by the academics reading these reports, it’s isn’t appreciated by most others. Even if someone does understand on an intellectual level that the differences are ten times larger than they appear - and many do not - the logarithmic scale makes this point less emotionally compelling. As a result, we strongly recommend retaining a linear scale to show just how much better some approaches are than others.

A badly presented graph can place even more mental strain on interpreting the graph than simply presenting a table of numbers. Edward Tufte’s book, the Visual Display of Quantitative Information (

) is an excellent guide to principles of graphical representation of statistics. In short, your images need to have graphical integrity: to present information as succinctly as possible, and to present information in a way that is not visually misleading (to minimise what Tufte calls the “Lie Factor” of a graph). Graphical integrity has a huge impact on people’s perception of the data presented.

Although we are familiar with the idea of criticising journalists for using misleading language in their verbal rhetoric, we are not as quick to point to the use of misleading data representation in statistical rhetoric, which is often non-verbal and highly visual.

Tufte’s key recommendations are as follows (with my comments in square brackets):

“1. The representation of numbers, as physically measured on the surface of the graph itself, should be directly proportional to the numerical quantities represented [i.e. no log scales; use the numbers in absolute values]

2. Clear, detailed and thorough labeling should be used to defeat graphical distortion and ambiguity. Write out explanations of the data on the graph itself. Label important events in the data.

3. Show data variation, not design variation. [Meaning: Do not let the presentation style obscure the variation in the data that you are trying to display, or introduce new variation when there isn’t any. Ask yourself: What comparison am I using this data to display? Consider that humans find it hard to make multi-layered comparisons, and simplify your graph into multiple graphs if necessary.]

4. In time-series displays of money, deflated and standardized units of monetary measurement are nearly always better than nominal units. [I will look at this in the next section.]

5. The number of information carrying (variable) dimensions depicted should not exceed the number of dimensions in the data.

6. Graphics must not quote data out of context.”

Interview with Peter Singer-Part I

a talk on effective altruism and Giving What We Can at the Cambridge Union

 took the opportunity to discuss effective altruism and effective careers with Professor Singer. In the first part of the interview, published below, Singer answers questions on giving and altruism.

Effective Altruism and some of the key questions behind it…

GWWC: How would you see the relationship between 

? Where would you place an emphasis? Do you see them as being equally important?

: They are both important. I think really what I'm interested in is the impact that we end up having on problems that need to be dealt with, let's say particularly the issue of global poverty. So it's like saying: if what you're interested in is how much water you get into a bucket then it depends on how wide or narrow the stream is as well as the force, the pressure, with which the water is coming out. You want altruism because that will mean that people do more, but you want it to be effective because that will mean it will have a bigger impact.

GWWC: In a nutshell, what is wrong with the morality exhibited by most people, and what is your alternative?