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Mike, did you bother to look at what Holden0 linked to? Granted, they don't look at enough causes, but they did a bunch of work to figure out who's good and published it. That's what I'm looking for. Telling every individual donor to go to mounds of research, or to forget it because they don't count enough, seems stupid and wasteful if there are websites out there (and there should be) doing the legwork and sharing it.
If anyone has more sites along the lines of givewell.net, please share.
To me there is a necessary link between transparency and quality. Transparency is more important than evaluation, more important than anything really, if you believe in your own fallibility.I really don't see people here as being the ones who are lacking in understanding.
"- Ivy Orator Holden Karnofsky offered wry counsel to the famously driven Harvard students.
"There's a saying here at Harvard: 'Friends, classes, sleep; pick two.' I recommend double sleep," he said. -"
Reading the book [Warren Buffett CEO], many of the managers talk about how they love working for him and being a part of Berkshire. They have access to all the capital they need, Buffett doesn't bother them, they don't have analysts or press to deal with, they don't have to meet quarterly earnings goals, and they can focus on the long term.
3. I can assure everyone here that the board of GiveWell will be discussing this in short order. Speaking entirely for myself, I believe this to be a quite serious issue because of the conflict between what Holden did here, and the goals of GiveWell to encourage more information, more transparency and more real accountability in charitable giving...So I take it you'll record the board meeting where you discuss Holden's viral antics? And we all get to hear it? Should be fairly entertaining.
5. Keep in mind that one of the reasons that the community here has been able to "dig up" so much information on GiveWell is that the organization is truly transparent. I would encourage each one of you to, for instance, listen to the recordings of our board meetings.
1. Now, I want to respond to some of the overwhelming cynicism here. While the cynicism is entirely deserved based on Holden's actions, it leads to the wrong conclusions.Wrong conclusions regarding GiveWell, not Holden's actions.
2. I will close by noting that none of the above is meant as a defense of Holden's actions here.
Please explain to me how (1) does not contradict (2).
Intelligent and cunning at the same time, rats are highly ambitious and strong-willed people who are keen and unapologetic promoters of their own agendas, which often include money and power.
You should not judge GiveWell by my comments, other comments here, or Holden's actions. You should judge GiveWell by visiting the site and closely examining what the organization has been doing.So what you're saying, Tim, is "don't judge us by what we say, or what we do - judge us by the quality of our copywriters and spinmeisters!"
Lucy Bernholz said...I commented on Ms. Bernholz's blog that the problem is not self-promotion. The problem is an organization that can't manage their own PR and marketing with honesty is trying to advise potential donors concerning whether charities are well run. If your organization is not well run, you really have no business determining whether other organizations are well run. How would you know?
OK So far as I can tell - but I haven't fully looked into this yet - Holden has now managed to piss off a bunch (a few?) people over on a site called MetaFilter. Since the poster of the above comment did so anonymously, I know nothing about his/her beef, connection, role at MetaFilter. The complaint appears to be rampant self-promotion, violating the rules of the MetaFilter community. Holden has been "rampantly self-promoting" from the day I met him, has pissed off old-line philanthropy for this reason as well, and I find it simply odd that it makes folks mad. Maybe they just envy his consistent promotion of GiveWell?
I'll try to make sense of what the MetaFilter complaint is all about and get back to you - however, I have to ask, "since when did rampant, overt, self-promotion" become a crime? I've never liked it myself, but it seems to be about as American as apple pie...
As a board member I'll look into this. I wish the poster - who seems to be mad at Holden for pretending to be someone else in order to draw attention to GiveWell had not chosen anonymity from which to make his/her accusation...
Ah the irony of the hot-under-the-collar web world.
Ah the irony of the hot-under-the-collar web world.
Hi -- I'm not anonymous, I'm one of the moderators of MetaFilter and I got to spend some of my New Years Eve watching this unfold and making sure it didn't get too crazy. My name is Jessamyn West and I live in Vermont.
Probabably the best place to get an idea of what happened is from the GiveWell blog where Holden explains that he he asked a question in our Q and A community Ask MetaFilter and then registered a second account so that he could "answer" it with another account that was not obviously linked to the first. This second account hyping GiveWell was also not linked specifically to GiveWell which is also sketchy. Promotion is one thing and not against the rules. If Holden had just stepped in and said
hey I run this cool non-profit" a lot of this could have been avoided. The fake answering stuff is a violation of our policies. The fact the the head of your organization is using this deception to get the word out is pretty shady in my opinion. That's a smaller issue than the bigger picture however.
It appears that, over the course of his explaining this lapse in judgement that resulted in this whole thread on MetaFilter and his apology on the GiveWell blog, that he has also done similar things, many times, on other blogs. This went on to the point where he, by his own admission used a "new employee account" [i.e. someone else's email address, if I'm understanding this correctly] to send out promotional information about GiveWell under someone else's name. Holden specifically said this
"I sent 10 emails to bloggers, from an gmail account that I had recently created for a new employee, with a 1-sentence plug for GiveWell. The email did not mention the employee's affiliation and was a deliberate attempt to plug GiveWell without the affiliation showing up, even though it used the employee's real name."
Again, if he was a shoe salesman, or someone else involved in the hypercapitalist world of sell sell sell, that would be one thing. He's not. He's involved in philanthropy and not just any philanthropy but an endeavor that promises on its own web site "complete transparency." He's also a high ranking member of that company, not some street team member. In my opinion, these sorts of shenanigans to not only promote GiveWell but to cast aspersions on the competition makes the organization look shoddy and like it's not walking the talk.
While I forgive your not having read or possibly analyzed what happened in the MetaFilter thread, I just want to assure you that while there are definitely a few heated exchanges, that at its core the issue here is not that Holden broke the rules of a web community, but that he used unethical tactics to promote the GiveWell organization, got caught, and did not give particularly convincing apologies or explanations.
Feel free to do whatever you feel is right. MetaFilter is just a web community at some level, but the fact that this extends to fraudulent emails, many more comments on other websites and a general strategy of deception should be deeply troubling to the people who want to sustain and build GiveWell's reputation and ability to do good works.
For those of us who have been interacting and working with web communities for the greater part of a decade, I'm dismayed that people who are newer to the playing field see this as just another way to game the web to hype themselves. There's much more to it than that, on all sides.
The Clear Fund is the world’s first charitable grantmaker that is devoted to transparency in its decisions....So transparency is very important, unless you are trying to avoid being dismissed as a self-promoting shill.
True transparency means information is not just available but accessible, coherent, and understandable....
Complete transparency means more than making our information sources available. It means making our logic clear and our materials truly usable even to the casual reader.
BY GEREMIAH AT 01:03 AM
Really tired of seeing this website trotted out there as "the answer for smart giving." All of their ratings are based on financial data, not on whether the organizations are doing things that work. If we shopped this way, we'd buy our shirts based solely on their sleeve-to-neck ratio, or something.
I'd much rather see more websites like www.givewell.net. (See this Ask Metafilter discussion)
Thank you to people from MetaFilter for explaining certain elements of this to me. After checking into MetaFilter myself, its also clear that "blatant self promotion" is clearly discouraged and should not have been attempted. Its also now clear to me that it is not what happened - instead it was a case of mis-representation of himself and his affiliation. This is downright stupid, shortsighted, and will invariably come back to bite you in your ass wherever it is attempted - online or off. It was dumb, discrediting, and damning.
Here's where we seem to be:
1. Holden made mistakes and has apologized.
2. The community at MetaFilter has shown it can and will enforce its own, clearly-published rules.
3. Online communities can be powerful forces for holding high the best standards of truth-telling. They, and their rules, should be respected.
4. Organizations are worth only as much as the integrity of their people and their collective action. Anything that jeopardizes the highest standards of integrity is trouble.
5. Beyond the bounds of specific online communities, operating within the parameters of clearly stated rules, I am personally troubled by anonymous posts that refer to comments/conversations that have been removed from the web. In the offline universe, these behaviors are prevented by rules that allow for the accused to face their accusers and the basic rules of evidence - what are the online protections?
While I know that efforts at "bloggers' codes of conduct" have floundered, I find myself wondering where the bounds are between self-policing and vigilantism?
posted by mathowie at 10:51 AM on December 31, 2007