First, thanks to paulfchristiano for the moderation. I'm also trying to be moderate, but it's sometimes hard to gauge one's own tone on the internet.

Now, apologies for replying to numerous points from different people in one post, but I would feel strange posting all over the place here and this is probably my last post. It would be helpful if people have more questions to send them directly and I can try to address them on the blog as multitasking (as well as so that more people can benefit from the answers, since as good as Less Wrong is, I doubt it would be the most appropriate long-term home for the main questions people have about AidGrade): http://www.aidgrade.org/blog.

Re: ygert's "I don't care about how many people are dying of malaria. I just don't. What I do care about is people dying, or suffering, of anything": We're trying to build up to this, but not there yet. Hang on, please. GiveWell in 2013 is also much better than GiveWell 1.0 was.

Just to quickly add: I've also separately been informed GiveWell's rationale for simplifying was because donors themselves seemed to focus on global health, with reference to section 2 of http://blog.givewell.org/2011/02/04/givewells-annual-self-evaluation-and-plan-a-big-picture-change-in-priorities/. My gut says that if they had picked a different organization as their #1 rated organization, they would see less emphasis on global health, but I can understand wanting to focus on what their main donors supported. It's a fair point -- if QALYs are what people want, that's what people want. But do people really put no weight on education, etc.? If you think to the big philosophers, you don't think of Nussbaum or Singer or whoever else saying okay, QALYs are all that matter. I'm not saying who's right here, but I do think there's a greater diversity of opinion than is being reflected here; the popularity of QALYs might in part be due to the fact we have a measure for it (as opposed to e.g. something that aggregates education (EALYs?) or aggregates across all fields or is harder to measure).

Re: meta-analysis -- first, a meta-analysis tool should in principle be weakly better than (at least as good as) looking at any one study. (See: http://www.aidgrade.org/faq/how-will-you-provide-information-on-context.) An advantage of gathering all these data and coding up different characteristics of studies is that it allows easier filtering of studies later on to allow people to look at results in different settings. If results widely vary by setting, you can see that, too. Second, all the things that go into a literature review of a topic also go into a meta-analysis, which is more like a superset. So if you don't think a paper was particularly good for whatever reason you can flag that and exclude it from the meta-analysis. We have some quality measures, not that you can tell that from what's currently online unfortunately.

My overall impression is that since GiveWell has quite rightly been supported by pretty much everyone who cares about aid and data, it's particularly hard to say anything that's different. Hardly anyone has any tribal affiliations to AidGrade yet, relatively speaking, there's the unknown, etc. But while I feel the concern (and excitement) here has been from people considering AidGrade as a competitor, I would like to point out each stands to benefit from the other as well. (Actually, now I see that paulfchristiano makes that point as well.)

And on that note, I'll try to bow out / carry on the conversation elsewhere.