multifoliaterose comments on Efficient Charity - Less Wrong

31 Post author: multifoliaterose 04 December 2010 10:27AM

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Comment author: jsalvatier 05 December 2010 12:43:02AM *  4 points [-]

Thank you for contributing towards this! Some hopefully constructive criticism:

  • The idea of comparing two charities together to see how different the good done by them is a good one.
  • Your Comparison ... section seems a bit long and I think it could be condensed substantially. The description of MakeAWish seems a bit lengthy. The Nurse Family Partnership comparison doesn't seem that compelling. Your citation of a paper that there's a 1000:1 effectiveness difference between many charities is dramatic; put that near the beginning!
  • I think you can move many sentences describing where your data came from to footnotes. Short articles are good! Wordy articles scare people away.
  • I'd say that picking out a good charity is substantially more difficult than picking a good investment. In finance, there's good reason to believe that an arbitrary asset will not be a terrible investment (efficient markets) while in charity there is currently no corresponding reason to think that an arbitrary charity will not be terrible.
Comment author: multifoliaterose 05 December 2010 01:11:28AM 0 points [-]

Thank you for contributing towards this! Some hopefully constructive criticism:

Thanks; I will consider these and revise accordingly.