[tmacaulay]

Thanks, we completely agree!

Right now, the incentives in the charity sector are totally screwed. The charities which get the biggest are the ones with the best marketing, not the ones which have the most impact. That means that big charities often hide their mistakes and focus on maintaining a wholesome image.

In contrast, many of the organizations we work with regularly publish their mistakes and lessons. By sharing this kind of information, the whole sector can learn and improve. In particular, GiveWell (http://www.givewell.org/about/our-mistakes) has a great page listing their mistakes.

We've been especially impressed with charities like New Incentives, who realised that the original target population they were trying to serve (pregnant women with HIV) wasn't big enough, so they pivoted to focus on incentivizing mothers to vaccinate their children so that they could gather more evidence and have an even bigger impact.

With EA Funds, donors pick which problems they want their donation to solve, and we find the best giving opportunities. We will fund both new start-up style charities and larger more validated approaches. We will fund charities which have run failed programs in the past, provided that they have updated their approach.

[ArneBab]

So New Incentives changed what they wanted to do because they would get paid more that way?

I know this sounds harsh. This is the incentive you create: Pushing people who initially wanted to help where they see need to instead focus on helping where they get more money for do so.

And a sufficient amount of free money is mostly available to a very small group of people.

This does not mean it’s necessarily bad. It just means that its incentives are skewed, too: The charities are pushed to become interest groups of the rich (to some degree this is also the case today, but stronger quality assurance also means more control to follow the largest donors' wishes).

[willmacaskill]

I think that's exactly wrong, I'm afraid.

In traditional charity, the incentives that charities have are to do whatever is going to fundraise the most. So the charities that get biggest are those that are best at looking good, rather than doing good.

The solution is to have a set of donors who really care about funding whatever does the most good. That means that a charity's fundraising incentives line up with what's actually best for the world. And that set of impact-motivated donors is exactly what we're trying to create with the effective altruism movement.

New Incentives is a great example of that working. In just the same way that a startup will pivot if it thinks it could be working on something else that's more profitable, because of the existence of the EA community New Incentives is able to pivot to a different approach that it thinks will do more good per dollar and knows that, if it succeeds at doing that, it will be able to grow more.

[tmacaulay]

Thanks for your feedback, the dynamic you're talking about is exactly the problem we're trying to solve. We want the best charities, which target the biggest needs, in a cost-effective way, to get the most funding.

New Incentives changed what they were focusing on because their initial program was proven to be less effective. They got some initial results from their study, and it showed that because they could only reach a smaller number of people, their program didn't hit the threshold they were targeting for cost-effectiveness.

Right now charities are incentivised to skew their programs towards areas in which they can get the most funding. We're trying to fund programs based on effectiveness, and build a community of donors who will donate to whatever programs are proven to be the most effective. If people founding non-profits know that there is a community of donors who will fund programs that work, we fix these incentives, and we hope to see many more effective programs launched. This should make it easier for effective charities to get the funding they need to grow.

We don't focus on special interest groups, and we don't fund whatever our largest donors are most interested in, we only fund programs that are highly effective.