Yes! The overview/title captures what I've seen as well, esp from newer community members. I spend a lot of my time telling people that they know their situation better than I do (and have probably infuriated people by not answering questions directly :)).

One point I'd highlight: I find that people often lack confidence in the plans they make, and that makes them more uncertain, less likely to act, and maybe have less motivation or drive.

This is often caused by imposter syndrome, or chasing a unrealistic sense of certainty or assurance that doesn't exist. (More speculative) I think people also may not want to come off as overconfident/arrogant/uncalibrated, and the norm is to trend too much in the opposite direction.

(Even writing this, I feel like confidence is a loaded term in this community and I feel the urge to qualify it, but I won't give in!)

What groups of people do you see this most commonly with?

On priors, I would expect most ea aligned donors (or researchers / evaluators) to take things like this into account because they seem pretty fundamental.

Oh interesting. I want to dig into this more now, but my impression is that an individual's giving portfolio - both major donors & retail donors, but more so people who aren't serious philanthropists and/or haven't reflected a lot on their giving - is that they are malleable and not as zero-sum. 

i think with donors likely to give to ea causes, a lot of them haven't really been stewarded & cultivated and there probably is a lot of room for them to increase their giving. 

The total funding pie is pretty fixed; I expect it to be quite rare to grow it.

Could you say more on how you came to this conclusion?  

Hey Sebastian! Very curious how you calculated that amount?

Ah sorry I should have just said "3 main / larger scale funders" (op, eaif + meta funding circle). Funders from those groups include individuals.

But I was also unclear in my comment - I'll clarify this soon.

There actually is a lot stopping people from doing this independently - if you would ever want to scale and get funding you basically have 3 sources of funders, and if they don't approve what you are doing you won't get to become a serious competitor

I agree he's not offering alternatives, as I mentioned previously. It would be good if Leif gave examples of better tradeoffs. 

I still think your claim is too strongly stated. I don't think Leif criticizing GW orgs means he is discouraging life saving aid as a whole, or that people will predictably die as a result. The counterfactual is not clear (and it's very difficult to measure). 

More defensible claims would be :

• People are less likely to donate to GW recommended orgs
• People will be more skeptical of bednets / (any intervention he critiques) and less likely to support organization implementing them
• People will be less likely to donate to AMF / New Incentives / (any other org he specifically discussed or critiqued)
• People may be more skeptical of LMIC philanthropy more generally because they feel overwhelmed by the possible risks, and donate less to it (this statement is closest to your original claim. For what it's worth, this is his least original claim and people already have many reasons to be skeptical, so I'd be wary of attributing too much credit to Leif here) 

I didn't read the article you linked, I think it's plausible. (see more in my last para) 

I'd like to address your second paragraph in more depth though: 

He's clearly discouraging people from donating to GiveWell's recommendations. This will predictably result in more people dying. I don't see how you can deny this. 

I don't think GW recommendations are the only effective charities out there, so I don't think this is an open-and-shut case.

• GW's selection criteria for charities includes, amongst other things, room for more funding. So if an org has only $1M RFMF, regardless of how cost effective the org was, GW wouldn't recommend them because they are looking to recommend charities with some bar (I believe at least 10s of millions, possibly more) of funding.
• A number of CE orgs estimate their impact could be as cost-effective, or more (with higher uncertainty of course!) than GW top recommended charities. They could also just donate to non-EA affiliated charities that are more / as cost effective as GW charities.
• GW also has it's own limited scope, which I think plausible result in them missing out on some impactful opportunities e.g. relating to policy interventions and orgs working on growth (ala Growth and the case against randomista development). 

 FWIW if helpful what my own views here are - I think I'm a lot more risk neutral than GW, and much more keen to expand beyond GW's scope of GH&D interventions. GW is ultimately 1 org with it's own priorities, perspectives and, biases. I'd love to see more work in this space taking different perspectives (e.g. The case of the missing cause prioritisation research). 

Do you really think that general audiences reading his WIRED article will be no less likely to donate to effective charities as a result?

I'm sympathetic to this point (where i interpret effective charities as a superset of GW charities). I think it's plausible he's contributed to a new "overhead myth" re negative impacts of aid (although, keep in mind that this is a pre-existing narrative). I would have liked Wenar to talk more about what kinds of trade offs he would endorse making, examples of good trade-offs in practice, examples of actually bad trade-offs (rather than potentially bad ones), and, if he's very skeptical of aid, what he sees as other effective ways to help people in LMICs. It's possible he covers some of this in his other article. 

I agree with the omission bias point, but the second half of the paragraph seems unfair.

Leif never discourages people from doing philanthropy (or, aid as he calls it). Perhaps he might make people unduly skeptical of bednets in particular - which I think is reasonable to critique him on. 

But overall, he seems to just be advocating for people to be more critical of possible side effects from aid. From the article (bold mine)

Making responsible choices, I came to realize, means accepting well-known risks of harm. Which absolutely does not mean that “aid doesn’t work.” There are many good people in aid working hard on the ground, often making tough calls as they weigh benefits and costs. Giving money to aid can be admirable too—doctors, after all, still prescribe drugs with known side effects. Yet what no one in aid should say, I came to think, is that all they’re doing is improving poor people’s lives.