{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"80,000 Hours Podcast","title":"#37 - GiveWell picks top charities by estimating the unknowable. James Snowden on how they do it.","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":6247,"description":"What’s the value of preventing the death of a 5-year-old child, compared to a 20-year-old, or an 80-year-old?\n\nThe global health community has generally regarded the value as proportional to the number of health-adjusted life-years the person has remaining - but GiveWell, one of the world’s foremost charity evaluators, no longer uses that approach.\n\nThey found that contrary to the years-remaining’ method, many of their staff actually value preventing the death of an adult more than preventing the death of a young child. However there’s plenty of disagreement: the team’s estimates of the relative value span a four-fold range.\n\nAs James Snowden - a research consultant at GiveWell - explains in this episode, there’s no way around making these controversial judgement calls based on limited information. If you try to ignore a question like this, you just implicitly take an unreflective stand on it instead. And for each charity they look into there’s 1 or 2 dozen of these highly uncertain parameters they need to estimate.\n\nGiveWell has been trying to find better ways to make these decisions since its inception in 2007. Lives hang in the balance, so they want their staff to say what they really believe and bring their private knowledge to the table, rather than just defer to a imaginary consensus.\n\nTheir strategy is a massive spreadsheet that lists dozens of things they need to estimate, and asking every staff member to give a figure and justification. Then once a year, the GiveWell team get together and try to identify what they really disagree about and think through what evidence it would take to change their minds.\n\nFull transcript, summary of the conversation and links to learn more.\n\nOften the people who have the greatest familiarity with a particular intervention are the ones who drive the decision, as others defer to them. But the group can also end up with very different figures, based on different prior beliefs about moral issues and how the world works. In...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/VO1STE7hN95RRg9QdLo4soV2VhhbR9PF5ZZlRhDYcwE/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9zaG93/LzQxNDAyLzE2ODM1/NDQ1NDAtYXJ0d29y/ay5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}