I haven't noticed this trend, could you list a couple of articles like this? Or even DM me if you're not comfortable listing them here.

I hadn't thought of this and found it quite compelling. 

"When markets are doing unusually well, other funders have unusually much to spend on services for the poor, and the poor probably have more to spend on themselves as well. So it probably gets more costly to increase their wellbeing."

And the flipside that if the market crashes, that money sitting in the bank could become so much more valuable as philanthropy than its face dollar value. Nice one!

"and An EA-aligned endowment held in safe bonds would not have lost value, and so would have done a lot more good now that the marginal utility to “EA spending” is (presumably permanently) higher than it otherwise would have been.

Nice one.

Wow Larks you really did a thorough and impressive roundup there. If anyone is interested you can check out his 2021 review here.

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/BNQMyWGCNWDdP2WyG/2021-ai-alignment-literature-review-and-charity-comparison

I've been on the forum for maybe 9 months now, and I've been intrigued by the idea of "hits based" giving, explained well in this 2016 article by Holden Karnofsky. The idea that "we will sometimes bet on ideas that contradict conventional wisdom, contradict some expert opinion, and have little in the way of clear evidential support." 

1) Is there a database with a list of donations considered "hits based"by Openphil? If not that would be a helpful and transparent way of tracking success on these. I had a quick look through their donations but its not clear which ones are considered "hits based"

2) Are there any donations considered "hits based" since that 2016 post which have clearly turned out really well, i.e. been winners? We might have seen some these hit based donations resolve positively or negatively, although 6 years is a short timeline so most would remain unresolved. Is there any official or unofficial info on that?

Thanks!

I like it nice one!

Thanks for the reply, and most of this makes sense to me.

I'm not sure I understand how you won't be involved in the selection of evaluators, who will do that exactly? Or maybe you mean you won't select the on-the-ground evaluators as in that will be done by the company, which makes sense.

"The monitoring grant will fund the creation of a sampling frame that includes both public and private health facilities, which we think will yield more complete data than contacting hospitals through our partners." This could work (high risk), but seems like a roundabout and inefficient way to do things. Following up on that data from multiple hospitals in West Africa for example could be a nightmare. 

I would have thought with this kind of massive funding and the relatively small number of people who get procedures (in the thousands), MiracleFeet could maintain a database the contact details of every kid who gets help - this wouldn't be hard and would make M&E so much easier for everyone. Hospitals might well collect substandard information which makes proper follow up impossible, spoiling your M&E efforts.

If I was going to give one piece of advice on M&E, it would be that your evaluators should follow up personally a completely random sample of individuals who had been treated - both to check that both the interventions actually happened, and that the claimed improvement is real. There should be a list of names, home locations and phone numbers of every single patient who received treatment - I think if that's not there and individuals can't be followed for this kind of intervention, than meaningful M&E becomes close to impossible.

I love this question, because surely there has to be a real maximum probability here.

Yeah thanks, given all these concerns, I think my idea is bad unfortunately. Seemed nice at first but not practical.

"pledge curious" now officially in the EA lexicon? Love it.

Haha 100 percent! Holding a lightening talk at a picnic Ajay sounds pretty ambitious, but be EAs are nothing if not ambitious ;)