yo, I will respond more later, at which point I’ll delete this comment and upload a new one. I don’t have time to write something careful at the moment, which is why I should not enter Forum discussions in general. 🤦‍♂️

thanks for your reply!

Tony, thank you for writing this post, and for your work at Fortify! I really enjoyed reading, and expect I'll come back for more re-reads later.

I don't think the framing offered in this comment is useful because it relies on the assumption that GiveWell's expected grantmaking is fixed at [whatever amount has been currently announced by GiveWell], and that expected grantmaking would not further increase with additional funds. I'm not saying that people should definitely donate to GiveWell (more on that below), just that this particular argument for not doing so doesn't hold up.

It's probably worth examining the historical parallel here:

• In conversation, groupchats, and various social chatter that I've seen this year, lots of people assumed prior to CG's latest funding announcement that GiveWell's grantmaking might have capped out at ~$500-600M this year, and that as a result GiveWell had no more near-term absorptive capacity.
• That turned out to be extremely wrong; GiveWell quickly found new funding opportunities when fundraising expectations increased, and its grantmaking expectations ~doubled.

There's certainly a point at which GiveWell would reach full funding saturation based on available opportunities and staff capacity, but I don't think there's any basis to assume that the saturation point happens to be $1B, especially since GiveWell has asserted that it is funding-constrained and generally has a strong track record of being truthful about its sincere beliefs.

If I were currently deciding where to donate in global health, I expect I wouldn't try to guess at GiveWell's absorptive capacity and would instead use these frames to think through the decision:

• Marginal CE of GiveWell vs. other GHD funders
• Immediacy of impact - "absorptive capacity" is often used in a bunch of ways, and isn't necessarily equivalent to "money has impact in the world quickly". I'm personally getting more worried about transformative AI coming soon, so that heightens my interest in having impact quickly vs. betting on potential future impact.
• Ecosystem effects - Tony mentions many interesting ones above. For example, if a larger GiveWell would fund disproportionately fewer small- to medium-sized orgs and if I believe that those smaller orgs are necessary to build a good future GHD ecosystem, I might be worried about funding GiveWell vs. other opportunities.
• Discount rates, but I don't expect this would shift me much relative to the considerations above
• Risk tolerance, which would include both the inherent risk of funding early-stage orgs and the track records of intermediary funders
• (probably more stuff that doesn't occur to me atm; I'm writing fast)

When I've done this kind of thinking in the past, I've ultimately settled on giving to CE/AIM for my GHD giving - that's mainly because I tend to favor catalytic investments and hits-based work in my personal giving, and because I'm cripplingly contrarian and easily influenced by arguments that big institutional actors are missing things. I could definitely see myself giving in the future to e.g. the Mid-stage Global Health Fund or another similar funder!

But fwiw, I think that the question of "Where can my dollars have the most impact in global health" is not at all clear, including because many of the questions about ecosystem effects, funder diversity, etc. are not settled at all and because we don't know yet how GiveWell will behave at large funding levels. I'd be very interested in seeing more public discussion of those issues, and I think it's not a good idea to make decisions based on probably-wrong heuristics about GiveWell's likely absorptive capacity.

(I work at GiveWell and my thinking is inevitably informed by that experience, but the specific claims I'm making here rest on public information and personal opinions, not insider information - I'll keep it that way if this thread continues. I also don't donate to GiveWell right now, and haven't since I started working there: I currently give mostly to animal welfare and GCR opportunities, and I've donated ~20% of my likely 2026 giving to CE/AIM)

Cool discussion, thanks for sharing it!!

GiveWell has internal documentation about our compensation philosophy. I'm not going to quote it directly, but the gist is: "We don't want to overpay because that would be financially irresponsible and we don't want to underpay because that would inhibit our ability to execute our mission." Like Coefficient Giving (see Sam Anschell's comment), we benchmark our compensation to organizations that we think (1) do similar work and (2) try to hire similar talent. Our policy as written doesn't consider the spillover effects of our approach to compensation (e.g. its effects on the optimality of talent allocation between impact-focused organizations).

It's also worth noting that the unique setup of our retirement benefits (we increase salaries in lieu of offering e.g. a % match on 401k contributions) makes total compensation a better cross-org comparator than salary. But, I'm just making a pedantic point here, not trying to sneakily imply that GiveWell's total compensation isn't higher than many impact-focused organizations - it is!

@Ben_West🔸 this is not really a substantive comment, but just wanted to say that this is the only time I've seen someone mention Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God is Within You (imo one of the all-time great theological tracts) online or in real life—that was pretty exciting. Thanks for writing this; I really enjoyed the read!

One comment on a trivial thing:
You said that Satan's temptation of Jesus is not typically interpreted as meaning that governments are intrinsically Satanic. I think that's right. But, I don't think it's correct to say that the Bible clearly states that civil authority is intrinsically godly.

Your quote from the Cambridge Bible argues this, but their reasoning proves too much: If God is sovereign, you could use the same argument to say that everything (including sin) is divinely mandated because it's all created by God. Some Christian theological factions do actually hold that view–for example, by saying that God created sin in order to demonstrate His power and glory– but most do not.

I think the mainstream Christian view, sourced from a variety of Scriptures (but especially from Jesus' comments on Roman taxes in Mark 12) is something like "civil authorities are somewhat morally neutral; you should default to obeying their commands unless they're clearly in opposition to God's commands."

My best guess is that Tolstoy and many other Christian anarchists would actually agree with the precise logic of that statement, but where they'd differ from mainstream Christians is in the their interpretation of what's "clearly in opposition to God's commands". They'd argue that the set of civil commands that are contrary to God's commands is just very large—maybe including all civil commands—because such commands enabled the governments in their contexts to do ungodly things.

But, it's complicated; I think the debate in Christian theological circles about how to understand the morality of institutional behavior is very much alive!

Looking forward to attending!

Hey Clare, quick thoughts:

• How do EA hiring processes differ from other organizations? I think the main characteristic of EA hiring that people typically point to is work trial usage—EA-ish hiring processes typically rely on those heavily! But, whether work trial usage differs from other organizations probably depends on the comparators—for example, it's common for tech companies to also rely heavily on work trials, but it's uncommon for nonprofits to do so. One other feature of EA-ish hiring processes that I hear people talk about frequently is values alignment, which I'll very roughly define here as 'a combination of personal values, attitudes, and habits of work/mind that the organization regards to be crucial to supporting its impact.' Here, I'm not sure that EA-ish organizations care much more about values alignment than other organizations, but I do believe they often have stranger and harder-to-find values.
• Initial format of applications: I don't know precisely what job you're referring to here, but that sounds like an interesting question! I think I agree with your intuition that it's likely providing some indirect information on values alignment, but that's probably not all—it's probably also providing some signal on writing ability and how capably one structures one's thoughts. Sometimes the main value of 'unusual' or 'weird' application questions is that they force candidates to generate fresh, original thoughts instead of relying on standard, pro forma language.
• How much weight on engaging with EA ideas: This question just doesn't have a universal answer; it will differ markedly by organization and by role within an organization. At GiveWell we have very successful team members with all levels of prior engagement with EA ideas, and the same is true for several other organizations in the EA space that I know well.
• What do people get wrong: Hm, I think people probably consistently underestimate the value of being casual, direct, forthcoming, and plain in all aspects of their applications (and especially in their writing). And on work trials, I think people underestimate the value of including meta-commentary on their thinking processes, even if the commentary is rough!

This is a really interesting question! (flagging that I wrote this comment hastily and didn't edit much—lmk if it would be helpful to clarify anything.)

Bottom line: If you look at Glassdoor applicant reviews and sort by recency, you'll note that in the last ~year and a half, GiveWell has only received 2-3 negative reviews, which is about 10% of the total reviews. I think that's a departure from years prior, in which we received many more negative reviews.

I spent a lot of time thinking about Glassdoor shortly after I joined GiveWell (IIRC I was thinking about this in late fall 2023?). My diagnosis was that we were doing a pretty bad job of informing candidates about what to expect from our hiring processes, we were moving too slowly with candidates, and our communications were weak. Here are a few specific things that I think contributed to the improvement in our reviews:

• More up-front communication about the requirements of our hiring processes (for example, see this Research Hiring FAQ, and the FAQs on our jobs page). We've also added more details about future steps to every stage of our hiring processes.
• Clearly signaling throughout the hiring process that we don't plan to provide evaluative feedback to candidates, and that candidates should not expect this.
• Changing the tone/voice of our candidate communication. This is hard to describe clearly, but I think we've moved substantially away from language that felt cold/distant/corporate and toward language that feels personal/inviting/warm, without necessarily changing the factual content of the communication.
• Moving faster with candidates. This was mostly accomplished by hiring dedicated recruiting staff. Before we had dedicated recruiting staff, we often (and fairly!) received the critique that our hiring processes moved very slowly. Now our hiring processes move quickly—it's rare for us to take more than a week to get back to candidates at any stage, and we sometimes make same-day decisions on initial applications.

I also echo much of what @PhilZ said in his response to your question, especially: It's very difficult to get information about the extent to which Glassdoor (or similar) reviews deter strong candidates from applying. This is painful; I wish we had better information.

Last thing—wanted to quickly note current Glassdoor data (which I think is somewhat different than what you describe):

• Right now GiveWell has a 4.5 overall rating. Glassdoor notes this is higher than companies of a similar size and in the same industry, but we probably shouldn't put too much stock in either the base or comparative information—the former is based on 9 reviews, and the latter is based on comparison to companies that probably have very different hiring processes than GiveWell.
• The "interview ratings" tab shows 40% positive, 28% neutral, and 32% negative.

Regarding argument 3, wanted to note that GiveWell funded a large survey in 2019 to learn about the preferences of its beneficiaries (general commentary, dedicated page, blog post). The learnings from that study changed GiveWell's moral weights, and they've funded more work on understanding beneficiary preferences since then.

There are many more cases of GiveWell considering local insights, cross-context applicability of programming, etc. I'm commenting quickly so not going to pull examples at the moment, but I think it's pretty easy to look at ~any grant writeup and see evidence of this.

I'm focusing on GiveWell in this comment because I think GiveWell is implicitly the target of many critiques of "EA" global health and development funding. I'd retract the comment if it became clear that such critiques weren't referring to GiveWell.

And, this comment isn't intended to address the question of whether GiveWell and other EA-ish funders should do more to listen to beneficiaries and learn from local experts (personal opinion: they should), but I think some of the quoted critiques in argument 3 above are false if taken literally. Such critiques are consistently confusing to me; I'm not sure whether to interpret them as bad faith, imprecise, or as operating from very different basic views on moral philosophy and ethical obligation.

(commenting in personal capacity)