Case in point: Charity Navigator, which places unreasonable importance on irrelevant statistics like administrative overhead. There are already charity effectiveness evaluators out there that are doing counter-productive work.

Personally, I think adding another good charity evaluator to the mix as competition to GiveWell/Giving What We Can is important to the overall health of the optimal philanthropy movement.

I agree with the spirit of this comment, but I think you are perhaps undervaluing the usefulness of helping with instrumental goals.

I am a huge fan of GiveWell/Giving What We Can, but one of the problems that many outsiders have with them is that they seem to have already made subjective value judgments on which things are more important. Remember that not everyone is into consequentialist ethics, and some find problems just with the concept of using QALYs.

Such people, when they first decide to start comparing charities, will not look at GiveWell/GWWC. They will look at something atrocious, like Charity Navigator. They will actually prefer Charity Navigator, since CN doesn't introduce subjective value judgments, but just ranks by unimportant yet objective stuff like overhead costs.

Though I've only just browsed their site, I view AidGrade as a potential way to reach those people. The people who want straight numbers. People who maybe aren't utilitarians, but recognize anyway that saving more is better than saving less, and so would use AidGrade to direct their funding to a better charity within whatever category they were going to donate to anyway. These people may not be swayed by traditional optimal philanthropy groups' arguments on mosquito nets over hiv drugs. But by listening to AidGrade, perhaps they will at least redirect their funding from bad charities to better charities within whatever category they choose.

That speaks to GWWC's favor, I think. It would be odd for them to not take into account research done by GiveWell.

Remember that they don't agree on everything (e.g., cash transfers). When they do agree, I take it as evidence that GWWC has looked into GiveWell's recommendation and found it to be a good analysis. I don't really view it as parroting, which your comment might unintentionally imply.

I am only one of the contributors, but you're welcome to view my comments. I doubt it will be helpful for your purpose, though.

As a (perhaps) trivial example, consider the pair of predictions:

• "Intelligent roads are in use, primarily for long-distance travel."
• "Local roads, though, are still predominantly conventional."

As one of the people who participated in this study, I marked the first as false and the second as true. Yet the second "true" prediction seems like it is only trivially true. (Or perhaps not; I might be suffering from hindsight bias here.)

As one of the people who contributed to this project by assessing his predictions, I do want to point out that several of the predictions marked as "True" seemed very obvious to me. Of course, this might be the result of hindsight bias, and in fact it is actually very impressive for him to have predicted something like the following examples:

• "[Among portable computers,] Memory is completely electronic, and most portable computers do not have keyboards."
• "However, nanoengineering is not yet considered a practical technology."
• "China has also emerged as a powerful economic player."

Note also that some of the statements marked "True" are only vacuously true. For example, one of his wrong predictions was that "intelligent roads are in use...for long-distance travel". But he follows this up with the following prediction which got marked as "True":

"Local roads, though, are still predominantly conventional."

As you can see, I do not think that looking just at the percentage of true predictive statements he made is enough. Some of those predictions seem almost trivial. And yet we can't just dismiss them out of hand, because the reason I think they are trivial might just be because I'm looking at it from after the fact. Counterfactually, if intelligent roads had come about, but local roads were still conventional, would I still call the prediction trivial? What if local roads weren't conventional? Would I then still call it a trivial prediction?

We had no choice but to just mark such statements as true and count them in the percentage he got correct, because there's just no way I know of to disregard such "trivial" predictions. And this means we shouldn't really be looking at the percentage marked as true except to compare it with Kurzweil's own self-assessment of accuracy. Using the percentage marked as true for other reasons, like "should I trust Kurzweil's predictive power more than others'", seems like a misuse of this data.

My initial impression was that the volunteer completion rate would be higher among a group like LW members. But now I realize that was a naive assumption to make.

Whether something is doable is irrelevant when it comes to determining whether it is right.

A separate question is what should we do, which is different from what is right. We should definitely do the most right thing we possibly can, but just because we can't do something does not mean that it is any less right.

A real example: There's nothing we can realistically do to stop much of the suffering undergone by wild animals through the predatory instinct. Yet the suffering of prey is very real and has ethical implications. Here we see something which has moral standing even though there appears to be nothing we can do to help the situation (beyond some trivial amount).

While I appreciate the recommendation and understand why you recommended it after just now watching it on netflix, I honestly can't get over this laugh track. How do people watch shows with laughs in the background like this? I find it not only extremely distracting but also a bit insulting to have the show give me a cue of when I should find things funny.