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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!

Yuan Yang

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?

: What is wrong with it is that people tend to look predominantly at what they actually do as determining right or wrong rather than what they omit to do. Very often when we allow things to happen that we could have prevented, the consequences might be much more serious than infractions to moral rules that people take quite seriously. So I think that our attitude towards morality, to what is involved in living well, is warped by too much of a distinction between acts and omissions.

GWWC: In your experience do you think it's easier to get currently effective people to be more altruistic, or currently altruistic people to be more effective?

: That's a good question but I don't know the answer. I think it varies with the individual person - it will depend on who they are. You can also ask about people who are not presently altruistic - trying to make them altruistic is another step that's very important. Different people are moved by different things: Some people will be moved by how great the need is and how easy it is to have a large impact. Toby Ord tells the story of how he decided to get involved in 

 by calculating what he would make over his academic career and how much he needed to live on. He then realized that the remaining money could prevent 80,000 cases of blindness. Some people when they realize this will be motivated enough to become effective altruists. Other people will say "well I don't really care; I don't know these 80,000 people, whoever they are". Then I think it is a matter of connecting it with something they do care about. Most people want to feel that their life is fulfilling and satisfying and that they will be able to look back on it and feel that they made good choices. Contributing to something larger than oneself is one way of achieving this.

Do you think that the current concept of charity is misguided with its implications of generosity?

: The implication that I think is somewhat misguided is the idea that it's optional because it's charity; it's not an obligation in any way. This strikes me as a problem. Assuming that you're in the category that has an 'adequate' income then effective giving is an essential part of an ethical life, as essential as not violating the 'thou shalt not murder' principle or other fundamental principles.

GWWC: So if it's not about optional giving to 'buckets and collectors on the street', what is 

 For me there's an ideal level beyond which you wouldn't really want anyone to go and that's a very extreme level given that we have so much and that there are people in such need. That would be a level at which you can't do any more good by giving more. You might not be in the same condition as the people you're helping, but it might be that you wouldn't be able to hold down a job if you were to give more because you need to have decent clothes to wear, or you need a car to get around. This would be a stopping point where if you gave more you'd actually end up giving less.

GWWC: One of the things that characterizes effective altruism as opposed to conventional views of charity is an emphasis on rationality. Are there potential dangers of an over-emphasis on rationality?

: It is always possible to get carried away with reasoning I suppose and to lose track of what people are like and how they are going to respond. That's the kind of thing that I want to guard against when I say that we should try and set a standard that is achievable for most people. If you are purely following the logical implications of the position you would say: "well it's wrong to spend more on yourself or your children or a sick relative, rather than to give it to where it's most effective". But what I suggest is that we try and get people to do something that is effective without being too critical of them if they don't go the whole way. We must have a morality that is tailored to the way people are and not just to 'rational' beings. Giving What We Can takes the 10% standard as part of the pledge; in my book the Life You Can Save and on the website I set up of the same title there's a somewhat different standard which starts off lower and ends up higher depending on how much you earn. What we want to do is make sure that people are aware of the issue, are aware of their obligations, and are committed to doing something significant towards it. Hopefully, once you get people doing something significant they find it actually not that difficult, in fact they will find it rewarding, and then they can work their way up to something more.

GWWC: Do you think there's a risk that if the aim is to try and get people to be more altruistic, by confronting them with the notion of effectiveness, you also confront them with the notion of ineffectiveness which may actually decrease giving?

: There's a worry about how rigorously you maintain this standard of effectiveness. There is a concern that when people go to 

 one of the first things they see is this pie chart which says that they've evaluated hundreds of charities and there's only this thin sliver, or 1% of charities as they say, that they've ranked as highly effective. It's natural for people to get the idea that '99% of charities are not effective', but that's not what GiveWell is saying. I've been in discussions with them and I think they've made it a little clearer now that what they are saying is that these other charities have not been able to demonstrate to their satisfaction that they are effective. They may well be effective and may well be as effective as the ones that they do rank, it's just they may be doing work of the kind where you can't perform randomized controlled trials, or where in other ways it's harder to get a handle on how much they contributed to the solution of the problem as against other factors.

GWWC: To stay with the problems of effectiveness, when you allocate money to charities and you try to do it in an effective way, often it involves a decision not just for an effective charity but also against an ineffective charity, and I was wondering where you think one has to draw the line between the heart and the brain? So for example, a charitable intervention for, say, a relative, for a medical intervention, is probably a lot less effective in financial terms than giving to charity. But what reason do we have to prioritise a relative or someone we know over the many people that we could help by giving money to a more effective charity?

: I think we're impelled to help relatives by strong bonds that we have, strong attachments, which essentially are emotional rather than rational. So you asked what reason we have - I think ultimately we don't have a reason, we simply have… this is the way we are, this is what we want to do, and we're following that kind of inclination. I would see this as quite separate from the sorts of things that one does when one acts as an effective altruist. Which is not to say that you shouldn't help relatives, but just to say that helping relatives is on the spectrum of things like treating yourself to a good meal at a restaurant or something similar. There's a spectrum that goes from that to helping the relative who is ill and needs some assistance, towards helping those to whom there aren't the same sort of bonds but where you're making a bigger - the maximum - difference. If we're really speaking about effective altruism then helping your relatives is not a part of it. It may be something that's a nice thing to do, that shows the kind of person you are, but if you're living in a country like the United Kingdom it's very unlikely, almost impossible, that this could be the most effective thing you could do with your money from an altruistic point of view.

GWWC: You've mentioned GiveWell and Giving What We Can. I wonder if you have a picture of how charity is changing, how the effective altruism movement fits into this, and how new technology and data is changing the way we approach altruism and charity?

 I think it is changing! I think it's changing in part because of the emphasis on effectiveness, which has been around for a while and is increasingly taken seriously. If you go back a decade or so there was not much going on in the way of assessment. There was an American site called Charity Navigator which people would go to if they were looking for the 'good' organizations, but all charity Navigator did was to tell you how much of organizations' revenue went for administration and how much went for programmes. That's really a very naïve way of looking at how effective a charity is. Of course you can reduce your administrative expenses by not employing staff who will find the best programmes to fund. Then even if 95% of your revenues go to programmes these may be no good. Around that time we started getting people looking seriously at evaluation. There was the Poverty Action Lab set up by Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee at MIT which then had a spin off at Yale, Innovations for Poverty Action. Then GiveWell started alongside other organizations in other countries and Giving What We Can.

You're right that the availability of more data has been a part of this change, as has the Internet in bringing people together. If you ask "where are people really discussing effective altruism"? Sure, Esther Duflo and Dean Karlan at Yale are publishing studies in academic journals, and that's significant, but the lively discussions have been going on online, and they're enabling people from what was really quite a small community of interest to start with (and though growing remains small) to find each other. People who thought they "are the only ones to be bothered about this" are starting to see that there are other people with good ideas and similar concerns.

GWWC: We talked about effective altruism and it seems a demanding - or what some people might think of as a demanding - lifestyle. Do you think that without religious commandments or the categorical imperative of other moral systems there is enough impetus there to follow this sort of ethics?

r: I think there is enough impetus for people to follow a kind of ethics which points in the direction of altruism. I think one of the interesting things about the effective altruism movement is that it includes a lot of people who are secular as well as a lot of people who are religious, and they agree on the goals. On the basis of the evidence we have so far, I would say, that there are plenty of people who are motivated sufficiently by knowing what difference they can do without needing any kind of religious backing. I think the movement will continue to grow but maybe at some point it will begin to plateau and that may be because there are people who are not sufficiently motivated by the difference they can make. But to some extent that depends on the culture and the people they are surrounded by. We have to wait and see how the movement continues to expand.

GWWC: If we're talking about effectiveness and consequentialism, do you think there is a case for instituting charitable targets in law?

: To some extent, that already happens because the government legally taxes you and gives some of it to foreign aid. I don't favor a law that says everyone must give x percent of their income to charity. I think that if a government wants to do something like this, it can increase the money given to foreign aid. The government can also educate people and make it easier for them to give, as can corporations. I don't want to make it compulsory.

Look out for part two of this interview - in which Peter Singer discusses effective careers - coming soon.

Rob Wiblin

Kristian Rönn

The Copenhagen Consensus: making a bet on catching a big fish

We are currently looking into a promising opportunity to influence how large sums of development aid are allocated. The 

 (CCC), known for research forums organised to prioritise which global problems are most important to address, is aiming to influence the next round of Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) through further research and public advocacy. Here we will discuss this opportunity in further detail. We will start by giving you some background. Then we will give you some information about what we like about the CCC, why we think their undertaking might be effective, and what doubts we have. Finally, we will give you some insight into our current research approaches.

Over the fifteen years this second round of MDGs will be in place, the world is projected to spend some $2.3 trillion on development assistance of various kinds. While the MDGs are not a binding treaty regarding how organisations should spend their money they do draw a lot of attention to particular issues, and are therefore likely to have some influence over how that money is spent. Unfortunately, a significant share of that money will currently go to project that are either unproven or likely to result in far smaller benefits than could otherwise be achieved.

To coincide with this, the CCC will coordinate a new round of research from subject experts. This will build on their previous work in order to determine which of the goals the UN is choosing from would do the greatest good with limited aid budgets. They will then take the conclusions and promote them in person to decision-makers in the post-MDG process, including UN ambassadors, missions, agencies and NGOs, as well as the public through a user-friendly website and interviews and op-eds featured in major newspapers. The aim will be to replace strategies that do not deliver value for money with those that will. At the same time, the campaign will raise support for cost-effectiveness as a key guiding principle for the allocation of development assistance more broadly.

This research is expected to cost around $0.8m, and is already largely funded .The associated promotional activities will cost up to a further $1.2m, and will ensure this research is read and taken seriously by the people who most need to hear about it.

The CCC has a decade of experience undertaking research and are generally held in high esteem. We have, as some of you might already know, relied on the Copenhagen Consensus as a source in our own research, and we know from experience that they have produced useful reports highlighting neglected opportunities in the past.

They also seem to have some track record of influencing policy makers. Quoting Bjørn Lomborg’s book “How To Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place”:

Micronutrient delivery programs in Africa and elsewhere received significant attention and greater resources after they topped the Copenhagen Consensus list in 2008. The World Bank quoted Copenhagen Consensus research and findings in 2006 when it created its new strategy on combating malnutrition. In 2006, Copenhagen Consensus United Nations brought together 24 United Nations ambassadors, including the Chinese, Indian and American ambassadors, and set them the task of prioritizing limited resources along Copenhagen Consensus lines to improve efforts to mitigate the negative consequences of global challenges.

Although entirely plausible, we will of course try to independently verify those claims by speaking to policy-makers the CCC has been involved with.

Björn Lomborg’s fame seems to give the Centre the unique position to arrange meetings with highly influential people. Lomborg was selected as one of TIME magazine's 100 most influential people of 2004 and was named as one of the 50 people who could save the planet by The Guardian.

Their track record of getting significant media attention for their findings is also quite good. An example is the collaboration with 

 on the importance of priority setting they had last year. Lomborg also publishes regular op-eds in major newspapers.

So far they have been able to provide a clear plan for the project and sensibly answer most of our questions. They are also keen to participate in our evaluation process and take our ideas seriously.

Unfortunately, the people we have spoken to do not know who or what is most influential in the UN decision-making process. A lot of interest groups will have some involvement. Currently the debate is centred on the ‘

’ dominated by Indonesia, Liberia and the UK, which has just released 

 making recommendations about the next set of MDGs - a report which cites the Copenhagen Consensus five times. We do not know whether these recommendations will have a lot of inertia, or whether the final goals will still be up for grabs next year. This will hopefully become apparent over the next few months.

Another worry is that, there will be many groups who will notice this opportunity and try to influence the next round of MDGs. For instance, the 

 was launched by Academics Stand Against Poverty with a similar intention - to promote the inclusion of a target for reducing illicit financial flows. As a result, the Copenhagen Consensus Centre could be ‘lost in the crowd’.

We also worry that the research budget is not sufficient to accurately determine which goals are the best to include. The Centre will be spending under $1m to assess dozens of possible targets over a period of months. The modelling required for this is obviously challenging. Even granting their ability to get leading experts to work for low wages because they regard it as important research, they run the risk of promoting unreliable cost-effectiveness figures. More realistically, the project will consult existing experts on what are generally regarded as the best buys in development. While far from perfect, we expect that advice to be a significant improvement on other competing messages.

Finally, there is little research on how much money the last set of MDGs shifted, and it is a very hard question to answer quantitatively. The impression of most in the development community is that they were very influential - perhaps more influential than they deserve to be. However, it could be that the MDGs were chosen because they were popular, rather than the goals being popular because they were included in the MDGs.

We will continue speaking with the CCC directly to see if their plan makes sense. This has the added bonus of potentially improving the project even if we don’t end up recommending them. We will continue looking into the competing interests in the post-MDG process and whether the CCC can realistically change votes. We are also speaking with researchers who have participated in previous rounds of their research and trying to talk to organisations they claim to have influenced in the past.

Any recommendation of the CCC will necessarily be much more speculative than our recommendation of the Against Malaria Foundation, or anything else we have suggested to date. This can best be illustrated with the following fermi-calculation:

globalAid * mdgInfluence * effect * (effectFactor - 1) * P(marginal effect) * 1/budget

 is the global aid spending of 2,300,000,000,000

 is the money the CCC will need in their lobbying effort.

 is how much of that aid spending the MDGs are likely to influence

 is how cost-effective the MDGs are likely to be on average.

 is how much more effective we think the CCC proposal is then effect.

|¬_lobbyingFunded_) is how much the probability of the CCC successfully changing the MDGs will increase on the margin if we help them fund the lobbying component of their budget (since the rest of their budget is already funded).

We can try and put in some shaky estimates in the equation.

 = 0.01. In other words: the MDGs influence 1% of global aid spending. Unfortunately not much research has been done on the influence of the last round of MDGs, so this number is just a shot in the dark. If anyone knows about any research, please contact us!

 = 0.001DALY/$. This seems fairly reasonable since many interventions in our experience are around the $1000 for a DALY range. AMF in comparison gives you 20 DALYs for your $1000.

 = 2. This also seems like a quite conservative estimate since different interventions can vary by up to a 100x in cost-effectiveness.

) = 0.00125. Let’s say that they are able to change 1 goal of 8 in total and that there is a 1% probability for them to so. This seems quite conservative since the MDG High-Level Panel has already cited the CCC in their report. But remember that we are not talking about the probability of them influencing the MDGs overall, but rather the increase in influence they will have if we fund their lobbying component. In that case 0.00125 is more of a shot in the dark. It is also unclear whether the first dollar in their lobbying budget will have the same marginal benefit as the last dollar. It seems likely that it will, since lobbying is a pretty scalable operation as long as there are more influential policy makers to influence. The CCC also assured us that every dollar in the budget will only be spent on influencing the most influential.

| 2,300,000,000,000* 0.01* 0.001* (2 - 1) * 0.00125 * 1/1,300,000 = 0.022 DALY/$. |

From this it seems like the CCC will get you at least as far as AMF with (what feel like) quite conservative estimates. But there is still a high degree of uncertainty.

Any recommendation of the CCC will necessarily be much more speculative than our recommendation of the Against Malaria Foundation, or anything else we have suggested to date. Unlike the others, it will not come with a suggested ‘dollars per DALY’ figure, because I don’t think picking such a number clarifies what the project offers to donors. However, to have big impacts you sometimes have go for projects with no guarantee of success, and some members embrace that.

Regardless of whether we promote this specific project, we also expect there to be other potential collaborations between Giving What We Can and the CCC in the future, given our shared interest in reducing poverty through better giving and government spending.

Interview with GiveWell: Should we be funding research?

 interviewed GiveWell co-founder Elie Hassenfeld (pictured right) on a range of issues suggested by volunteers and members of Giving What We Can. This is the first instalment, focussed on the issue of meta-charity - or research into which forms of charity are most effective.

An unabridged transcript of the interview is available 

RW: Do you think there’s any chance that giving to organisations that research which interventions and organisations are most cost-effective, such as GiveWell, but also other research outfits like the 

 and so on could have a greater impact with each dollar than the organisations that you actually recommend?

EH: It’s definitely possible, I think it’s an interesting question. 

 (IPA), one of the organisations you’ve listed in the past. Our view is that, the organisations that we rate most highly right now, Against Malaria Foundation (AMF), Give Directly and the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI), are all better bets than IPA. We’ve definitely thought a lot about funding research, we’ve talked about this in the context of this cause of meta-research.

We’ve talked about this part of GiveWell Labs that would be funding a group like the 

. We’ve also thought about funding randomised controlled trials (RCTs) themselves. There’s questions involved there; the research we found in our work is actually more the research done by the global health community. That would be groups that are performing the RCTs on malaria nets, water and nutrition trials. That’s work that we’ve found really helpful.

I do think it’s interesting that people ask us about funding research or meta charity, and they tend to focus on the groups that are more visible, the groups like IPA or Jameel Poverty Action Lab, and less the groups that I think have been most helpful to us, which is just the general global health research. The other group that’s been incredibly valuable to us is the work done by literature reviewers broadly and the Cochrane Collaboration specifically. That’s a group to which we directed what we call a quick grant about a year ago and we are interested in what they do and have been following that.

RW: So did you manage to find any organisations that were doing that basic health research, who you could potentially fund?

EH: My impression is that a lot of that research comes from broader academic departments. There are researchers at universities working in the World Health Organisation. This is the type of thing where the type of groups to which an individual donor can write a check and cause something to happen may be different than the opportunity for a larger funder to fund a specific project. And that distinction is one that is becoming particularly salient to us as we think about the move from our traditional focus on direct aid-providing organisations, to other areas where we almost want to be thinking more like a major philanthropist. And so I think that thinking how to fund RCTs or global health research will likely be done more in the vein of here is an RCT that we find particularly valuable, so we’re going to go and identify the funding to implement this RCT and then provide it all in one go, rather than giving more money to organisations to support RCTs more broadly. Obviously one can do that for IPA and then all of the questions you want to ask are the ones that we discussed in our review of IPA.

RW: Sure, so did you have much success finding out whether these kinds of meta-charities were having influence on [government or charity] spending. Was that something that was possible to identify?

EH: It’s tough. I mean, IPA is the one we’ve looked at the most and we have a whole page up on them, about our best assessment of the impact that their research they’ve done has had on the conversation. The studies that seem most impactful to us are studies on deworming, studies on free bednets, the studies they conducted on microfinance. That does have an influence. Without a doubt, other trials have had an influence. I don’t think this is the type of thing where it was easy to possible to perform a very direct and obvious case of the exact nature of the influence that they had.

RW: Have you found organisations receptive to getting that kind of tied grant to perform a particular RCT or a particular literature review. Is that something that donors like our members should be thinking about trying to pursue?

EH: I think it’s difficult to pursue on their own. So this is just my general impression and I can’t promise you that this is 100% correct, but my impression is that a great deal of individual RCTs are funded by donors who are reasonably restricted with their grants. So it’s possible for them to say ‘I want to fund a study on water in a particular area, with a particular technology’; so that would be very restrictive. I could also imagine a funder providing a great deal of money for many RCTs somewhat related to - let’s say - water. So I think that is incredibly common as a model for false plunders: providing money for research.

I think it’s not a thing that makes a lot of sense for individual donors to be trying to do on their own. Depending on the study, studies can cost half a million dollars. So if you’re a donor with five thousand dollars, you’re not able to make a study happen with just that money and if you really want to give to this, you need to look to someone who can aggregate up the funds. Now this is something we’ve thought about doing. I think, down the line, GiveWell will do this. Essentially provide the mechanism by which individuals who want to provide to a larger pool of money that goes to things that those individuals couldn’t otherwise afford, we’ll provide the vehicle for them to do that - not something that exists right now.

All that said, I just want to take a step back. I think there’s a lot of reasons that research could be among the best things. At this stage in time, you know, I haven’t found any research that is right now obviously competitive with AMF. I think it’s important for anyone who’s thinking about this to not just think about the conceptual case that research could be good, but to try as hard as they can to nail down the specific organisation or the specific research that they want to do, and think about how that would trade off against giving to the top performing organisations.

There are two additional thing to be aware of when it comes to research. One is when we look at studies, often what we find is something goes wrong that diminishes the amount of information that the study can convey. So recently, we’ve been looking at some clean water trials. And this is a page that we’re trying to publish shortly. So these are studies of water purification technology. Basically, giving some people a filter, don’t give some other people the filter, then measure what happens to the water quality, measure what happens to health outcomes. In some of these studies, what happened is that the control group water filter actually causes the water to purify to some extent and this diminishes the power of the study to communicate results. One challenge of conducting studies is that you can conduct them, but there may be some problem in their implementation that reduces the impact.

Another issue to be aware of is that a single RCT is not particularly informative. And the programs that have the strongest evidence have multiple RCTs behind them. For example, malaria has tens of RCTs showing impact of nets on malaria, and so to get to the point where one has this body of knowledge that enables them to have a strong view about the impact of a program requires more than just funding a single trial.

All of that said, this remains an area that we, GiveWell, are very interested in considering, and I think it’s something we’ll be doing in the next few months. If we find the areas where research might have the biggest impact, that’s something we’re definitely considering trying to provide funding for.

Diana Fleischman

Die young and live fast

A guest post on the flow-on effects of better health on individual behaviour and society as a whole, from 

Evolutionary Psychologist Diana Fleischman

 at the University of Portsmouth, who recently joined Giving What We Can.

Curing and preventing disease can alleviate suffering and increase quality of life in the developing world in the short term, but reducing the burden of infectious diseases promises even greater long term benefits to individuals and society than you might think.

 describes psychological and biological changes that prioritize the short term over long term when there are early cues of a harsh and unpredictable environment. Cues of volatility such as parental absence or poor nutrition caused by infectious disease and poverty can change the psychology of a whole society. Removing these cues might have a significant impact on wellbeing.

In evolutionary terms, the goal of every organism is to have as many of its genes in the next generations as possible. Every organism has a limited amount of energy to allocate to activities such as bodily maintenance, growth and mating, each of which can contribute to successful reproduction. There are a number of different strategies that might increase the likelihood of success. You can grow large, or you can get to sexual maturity as quickly as possible. You can put energy into healing injuries, or into finding partners to mate with. You can have few offspring and try to make them as healthy as possible, hoping that they will be more successful as a result, or you can have a large number of offspring and invest little in each one, hoping that at least some will survive. Those strategies that prioritize maturing and producing many offspring quickly, are called "fast life history" strategies.

The success of different strategies is going to depend on a number of factors. One of the most important is how long an organism has left to live, and a good cue of this factor is the mortality of those around you. Researchers have found that environments which are unstable may cue a fast life history. In other words, these cues indicate to the organism that it is best to follow a strategy of reproducing sooner rather than later, because they could die at any moment. A fast life history strategy involves earlier sexual maturation, earlier sexual intercourse, greater number and less investment in offspring. This is because in a volatile environment where people die due to random events, success becomes a matter of luck rather than skill, and so it makes sense to have lots of kids rather than invest heavily in just a few 'highly skilled' ones. Furthermore, the time available to reproduce and rear offspring is limited, so you have to hurry. There are other characteristics associated with a faster life history that I'll discuss in more detail later in this post.

It's important to note that changes in life history occur both over generations and an individual's lifetime. For instance, over time a species that is less often eaten by predators may evolve to reach sexual maturity later, or have larger and fewer offspring. Humans have had a long history of living in diverse environments, as well as having an extended developmental period. Thus we 1) have a long period in which cues about the difficulty of the environment can change our reproductive outcomes and 2) we may have evolved to be especially sensitive to these cues. Cues such as early stress, father absence and nutritional scarcity have been associated with faster sexual maturation, earlier sexual debut, greater number of sexual partners, greater number and less investment in offspring in a variety of species including humans.

Here are a few examples of environmental cues and changes that are relevant to reproduction:

 in early sexual maturation when adults die due to an infectious cancer.

In women, father absence and parental separation predict earlier age of reproduction, earlier onset of sexual activity

, earlier age of first period and shorter duration of marriage (controlling for economic factors and mother's behavior).

Blog

Interview with Peter Singer-Part II

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

Interview with Peter Singer-Part I

The Copenhagen Consensus: making a bet on catching a big fish

Interview with GiveWell: Should we be funding research?

Die young and live fast

How to Present Statistics to Donors (Part I: Framing)

What do you get when 30,000 people rally in London's Hyde Park?

How Giving Games can spread the word about smarter charity choices

Every. Last. Child.