But I don't think people blindly defer to evaluators in other life domains either -- or at least they shouldn't for major decisions. For instance, there are fraudulent university accreditation agencies, non-fraudulent ones with rather low standards, ones with standards that are pretty orthogonal to whether you'll get a good education, and so on.

I suggest that people more commonly rely on a social web of trust -- one strand might be: College X looks good in the US News rankings, and I trust the US News rankings because the school guidance counselor thought it reliable, and the guidance counselor's reputation in the broader school community is good. In reality, there are probably a couple of strands coming out from US News (e.g., my friends were talking about it) and from School X (e.g., I read about some successful alumni). So there's a broader web to justify the trust placed in the US News evaluation, buttressed by sources in which the decisionmaker already had some confidence. Of course, the guidance counselor could be incompetent, my friends probably are ill-informed, and most schools have at least a few successful alumni. But people don't have the time or energy to validate everything!

My guess is that for many people, GiveWell doesn't have the outgoing linkages that US News does in my example. And it has some anti-linkages -- e.g., one might be inclined to defer to Stanford professors, and of course one had some harsh things (unjustified in my opinion) to say about GiveWell. It comes up in the AI overview when I google'd "criticisms of Givewell," so fairly low-hanging fruit that would likely come up on modest due diligence. 

I'd also note that independent cannot be assumed and must be either taken on trust (probably through a web of trust) or sufficiently proven (which requires a fair amount of drilling).

My guess is that GiveWell is simply not enmeshed in John's web of trust the way it is in yours or mine. Making and sustaining a widely trusted brand is hard, so that's not surprising. 

<I'm a bit disappointed, if not surprised, with the community response here.>

I can't speak for other voters, but I downvoted due to my judgment that there were multiple critical assumption that were both unsupported / very thinly supported and pretty dubious -- not because any sacred cows were engaged. While I don't think main post authors are obliged to be exhaustive, the following are examples of significant misses in my book:

• "animals successfully bred to tolerate their conditions" -- they are bred such that enough of them don't die before we decide to kill then. It's hard to see much relevance to whether they have been bred to not suffer.
• The focus on humans "failing even to reproduce at replacement rates" suggests a focus on wealthy countries. Where's the evidence that people in wealthy countries are not reproducing due to too much suffering, or discontent with their alleged domestication? The post doesn't engage with people in those countries being happier than the median; the effects of education, income, and changing social mores on fertility; and other well-known factors.
• More fundamentally, the assertion that there are "similar dynamics" at play between humans and farmed animals is particularly unsupported in my view.

It's important to not reflexively defend sacred cows or downvote those who criticize them . . . but one can believe that while also believing this post seriously missed the mark and warrants downvotes.

Yes, that's correct.

Yes and no -- the only concrete thing I see @WillieG having done was "sign[ing] letters of recommendation for each employee, which I later found out were used to pad visa applications." 

I would find refusing to write a letter of recommendation on "brain drain" concerns to go beyond not funding emigration efforts. I'd view this as akin to a professor refusing to write a recommendation letter for a student because they thought the graduate program to which the student wanted to apply was a poor use of resources (e.g., underwater basketweaving). Providing references for employees and students is an implied part of the role, while vetoing the employee or student's preferences based on the employer's/professor's own views is not.

In contrast, I would agree with your frame of reference if the question were whether the EA employer should help fund emigration and legal fees, or so on.

Who said we should "PaNdEr" to conservatives? That reads like a caricature of the recent post on the subject. If you're claiming that there is a pro-pandering movement afoot, please provide evidence and citations to support your assertion.

I think the significant majority of people here -- including me! -- are somewhere between unhappy to extremely upset over yesterday's events, but that doesn't justify caricaturing good-faith posts. If you have a concrete, actionable idea about how we should respond to those events, that would make for a more helpful post.

Good observation -- most of the drop in the number of new donors was seen in 2022, but little of the drop in the amount of donations from new donors happened then [$43.4MM (2021) vs $41.1MM (2022) vs. $20.5MM (2023]. Because of their size, the bulk of the 2021 --> 2022 drop was almost certainly people giving under $1,000, which is somewhat less concerning to me due to the small percentage of GiveWell's revenue that donations under $1K provide (less than 3%). There are a good number in the $1-$10K range, but they did not show a significant decline overall between 2021 and 2022. 

Presumably, the 2022 --> 2023 drop in revenue involved loss of new higher-dollar donors. My assumption is that higher-dollar donors act somewhat differently than others (e.g., I expect they engage in more due diligence / research than those donating > $1,000 on average). So it's plausible to me that the 2021 -> 2022 numerical decline and the 2022 --> 2023 volume decline have (or do not have) very similar causes. I'd guess FTX might hit higher-dollar new donors more because of the extra due diligence. 

The following chart is for all donors, not new ones:

The other number I found potentially concerning was the 50% drop in year-over-year funds from new non-anon donors (p. 10 of the 2023 metrics report, see paste below). Funds from new/non-anon donors in 2021 were slightly higher than in 2022 per the 2022 metrics report, so the prior year wasn't the anomaly. 

I don't want to over-update on a single year's Y/Y difference, but my concern would grow if 2024 ended up similar to 2023.

I would not have predicted much effect of the FTX affair on GiveWell's new donor acquisition, but it's possible that played a role.

You seem to be assuming that the primary harm of malaria deaths and (conditioned on "fetuses counted as people") of abortion is the suffering that children and fetuses experience when dying of malaria and abortion, respectively. That's an unusual assumption; I think most people would identify the primary harm as the loss of ability to live the rest of the child or fetus' life. 

So I think you're missing a step of either (1) explaining why your implied assumption above is correct, or (2) comparing human loss-of-life to chicken suffering rather than suffering to suffering as your infographic does. (In the world where factory farming ended, these chickens would likely not exist in the first place, so I wouldn't include a loss-of-enjoyable-life factor on the chicken side of the equation).

Reading Evan's comment and Sarah's response -- along with some other comments like @titotal's -- updates me to a mild-to-moderate degree toward the possibility that there may be a felt (and possibly real) need for two or more related spaces that call for mutually inconsistent design criteria. One might be more academic, formal, and rigorous while the other related space would be more flexible, open, and accessible. That feels like a big change from the status quo, and I'm hardly confident my update is directionally correct. But I think it's worth pondering whether different groups of users may be seeking things from the Forum experience that are valid, worthwhile, and yet incompatible.

Over the course of 2024 (and indeed, since early 2023), Forum usage metrics have steadily gone down^[1]. My subjective opinion was that the Forum did not meet my (perhaps too high) expectations in terms of producing valuable discussions that enable collective intellectual progress on the world’s most pressing problems^[2]. 

I would start with the assumption that this had a lot more to do with the larger zeitgeist vs. anything to do with what the Forum team did / didn't do. For instance:

• In the era with fairly accessible and expanding financial & human resources, people might have been more motivated to devote time to proposing novel and exciting stuff because they assessed a higher probability of launch feasibility;
• In the immediate post-FTX era, critical voices might have felt that the kettle was hot and that they had a better chance of getting desired reforms through vs. now;
• And so on.

Some of this is normal, inevitable, and even necessary as a social movement develops. I don't have any clear opinion on whether what you're identifying here fits into the normal/necessary bucket or the something-to-be-addressed bucket. My low-confidence guess is that there is something in both?

All that is to say that I would be cautious about weighing raw quantitative or qualitative data about the quality of Forum discussions too heavily in the Forum team's feedback loops. There is likely to be a lot of noise.