[EduardHL]

Congrats on your venture!

Will you give more detail on how you address the following four steps mentioned in your website:

1. Which problem areas are most important?

Metrics used for each fund (DALYs, etc.)? Sources used? etc.

2. Which interventions are likely to make progress in solving the problem?

Sources used? How do you evaluate interventions with less predictable outcomes (such as clean energy research)? etc.

3. Which charities executing those interventions are most effective?

Indicators used? Type of due diligence? Do you rely only on reports or do you also regularly check on-the-ground reality? etc.

4. Which charities have a funding gap that is unlikely to be filled elsewhere?

Methodology (funding inflow/outflow models and/or constant dialogue with organisations ...)?

Again, really great initiative; would be interested to understand more in detail.

[willmacaskill]

Thanks for the enthusiasm!

I think a lot of your questions can be answered here (including the other pages that these pages link to): http://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/our-process and http://www.givewell.org/how-we-work/process

Because our fund managers are all GiveWell and Open Philanthropy staff, we inherit their methodology. If in the future we move beyond GiveWell and Open Philanthropy fund managers, we'll need to have pages on their process too (and how it potentially differs from GW / OP).

A more accessible introduction to how to assess which problem area is most important is here: https://80000hours.org/career-guide/most-pressing-problems/

[colophonemes]

I'd add that these things will differ between cause areas, so it's hard to give a neat, roll-up answer. DALY's and NPV income estimates are fairly good in the global health space, but other cause areas may need to make more speculative comparisons because they deal with things that are harder to measure.

In all cases, when a Fund makes a grant, the fund manager will provide a write-up outlining their rationale. For now, each fund manager has a list of previous grants they've made, so you can get a sense of the organisations they are likely to grant to (though by no means does that imply that they necessarily /will/ grant to these specific orgs in future).

One of the key advantages of the Funds model is not locking you in to a particular charity up front, which means that as more information about funding gaps, intervention effectiveness etc comes to light, fund managers can respond accordingly.