Definitely - though I think mandatory reformulation is the best amongst the existing top solutions we recommend. It shows the largest effect size under the modelled parameters, but also it's probably less politically toxic - taxes are comparatively harder. We see this with climate too, where people favour quotas/quantitative limits over taxes even if the effects are literally identical.

It is a fairly reasonable case to make, that some organizations are overpaying, at least from the standpoint of maximizing welfare per dollar.

On the medical expenses issue - that's a legitimate concern, but to be fair, I find it's a US-centric worry insofar as other EAs from high income countries are protected by more robust public healthcare systems. And it was even worse pre-ACA, of course!

Best of luck, J.T.

On the salary issue, I'm in a position to comment:

(1) I agree that it's unfortunate, because practically speaking this will deter some talented people from participating in founding charities. On the flipside, lower salaries do mean self-selecting into more intrinsically motivated/altruistic individuals, but I'm not sure if it outweighs the former effect.

(2) My own view is that the salary structure doesn't disadvantage less affluent individuals per se - at least not on a global scale. Think of it more as a U-shape curve, whereby a potential cofounder from a low or middle income country is able and willing to tolerate a much lower salary; while a rich world individual on the upper end of the income spectrum (e.g. inherited family wealth or savings from their previous banking/tech/consulting job) can afford a low or zero salary; it's more those on the lower and middle part of the income spectrum in developed countries that are unable to cope (relative to the standard of living they are accustomed to).

(3) Older individuals, with family or children commitments are the hardest hit. That said, students/fresh grads will probably be able to manage the matter.

(4) But at the end of the day, if we're serious about doing good, and saving/improving people's lives, we really should make a conscious choice to make the sacrifice.

Thanks Vadim, and the team at FP! This was really informative. CEARCH did a fairly shallow dive on education before (looking specifically at streaming/TARL), and found that while it might be competitive with GiveWell, it didn't match our fairly aggressive bar of 10x GiveWell cost-effectiveness (which typically only policy and mass media health interventions meet) - we'll probably relook the issue eventually, and your research will be really useful!

The only other thing I would add is that income isn't everything, and we probably should value the pure intelligence effects, independent of income. Presumably, even if education didn't make us any richer, but still made us more cognitively capable, we would assign a non-trivial value to that! And of course, people do value avoiding relative cognitive incapability in and of itself - hence the GBD moral weights on intellectual disabilities ranging from 4% to 20% (for mild to profound), which may itself be an underestimate; compare the GHE moral weights of 13% to 44% for the same disabilities. (https://cdn.who.int/media/docs/default-source/gho-documents/global-health-estimates/ghe2019_daly-methods.pdf)

Hi Rime,

We based the requirements off the Open Philanthropy Cause Exploration Prize's official rules - see the full legal terms linked to here (https://www.causeexplorationprizes.com/rules-faqs) - and changed them only when necessary. Then it was vetted by the lawyer at CEARCH's fiscal sponsor.

I can't speak for the lawyers, but my presumption as a non-expert is that there are good legal reasons for the various clauses. For example, the prohibited-by-law stuff is obvious enough; and I imagine the access-to-internet-clause is ensure no administrative difficulties with contacting winners after the fact and getting the details needed to wire them their money.

This would be massive if successful, and one of the few ways around XDRTB (and should contribute to slowing drug resistance more generally).

Thanks! It would be interesting if we could identify a genuinely new high-level cause domain outside GHD/animals/longtermism/meta - though given how broad these are, it's definitely easier finding new important/tractable/neglected ideas *within* these domains than without.

Cheers, Sam!

Hi Jamie. For both (causes broadly defined)! Yes, it's just one USD 300 prize (for causes), and one USD 700 prize (for methodologies).

A useful post, Ozzie, and definitely food for thought.

I would just like to point out one fairly significant consideration in favour of small organizations that isn't factored in here - ownership and motivation (i.e. the founder and other early-stage employees slave away work far harder because we feel a sense that the organization is yours - you are the organization; you don't work for it). This has been my own experience, and I imagine it's much the same for you. I believe Joey Savoie talks about this fairly often, when asked why Charity Entrepreneurship doesn't just hire people to implement effective global health & animal ideas in-house, rather than using these people to incubate new orgs