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Dagon comments on “Be A Superdonor!”: Promoting Effective Altruism by Appealing to the Heart - Less Wrong Discussion
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I like that framing.
How does the EA movement generally feel about the current choice between donating to evaluation agencies vs direct action? Is each donor encouraged to decide what the split should be?
As far as I understand GiveWell get's enough money by asking people privately that there no need to publically encourage new people to give to it. It's okay when a new donor simply gives to direct action.
There's no centralized apparatus of directing funding, unfortunately. Most ordinary EAs give to direct action, as that's where it is intuitive to give. More wise EAs specifically donate to evaluation and outreach organizations, to direct funding against the general trend and donate where they can make the most effective impact, even though it doesn't feel as warmfuzzy as direct action.
So, what's really needed is a meta-evaluation organization, which can help donors choose how much effort to direct toward direct results and how much toward evaluation, and how much toward outreach (and to evaluate the evaluators). And then a meta-meta-evaluation to figure out how to rate and value the evaluator-evaluators. And so on.
My guess is each level should get handwave-exponentially-fewer resources, and that it converges to zero people working seriously on meta-meta-meta-evaluation, and only fractional people in ad-hoc ways even on meta-meta-evaluation. But the overall topic might be big enough now to have a university group doing studies on relative effectiveness of EA aggregators compared to each other and to direct action groups.
I think one level of meta-evaluation should be sufficient :-) Namely, one organization that would help donors decide how much efforts to put into nonprofits dedicated to promoting EA, nonprofits dedicated to evaluating charities, and direct action nonprofits.