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wdmacaskill comments on Giving What We Can, 80,000 Hours, and Meta-Charity - Less Wrong
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This is a really interesting issue, and it applies to any exceptional giving candidate, not just to meta-charities. In order to get exceptional value for money you need to (correctly) believe that you are smarter than the big donors - otherwise they'd already have funded whatever you're planning on funding to the point where the returns diminish to the same level as everything else.
This relates to the issue of collecting lots of hard data because rationality is partly about the ability to make the right decision given a relatively small amount of data.
My tentative conclusion is that if you have no good reason to believe you're more rational than the big money then the best thing is to invest your resources in improving your own rationality.
That's if you think that the big funders are rational and have similar goals as you. I think assuming they are rational is pretty close to the truth (though I'm not sure: charity doesn't have the same feedback mechanisms as business, because if you get punished you don't get punished in the same way). beoShaffer suggests that they just have different goals - they are aiming to make themselves look good, rather than do good. I think that could explain a lot of cases, but not all - e.g. it just doesn't seem plausible to me for the Gates Foundation.
So I ask myself: why doesn't Gates spend much more money on increasing revenue to good causes, through advertising etc? One answer is that he does spend such money: the Giving Pledge must be the most successful meta-charity ever. Another is that charities are restricted in how they can act by cultural norms. E.g. if they spent loads of money on advertising, then their reputation would take a big enough hit to outweigh the benefits through increased revenue.
Agree with the part before the dash, have a subtle but important correction to the second part. While the explicit desire to look good certainly can play a role, I think it is as or more common for giving to have a different proximate cause, but to still approximate efficient signaling (rather than efficient helping) because the underlying intuitions evolved for signaling purposes.
The best way to look good to, say, exceptionally smart people and distant-future historians, is to act in almost exactly the way a genuinely good person would act.