Hey Sebastian! Very curious how you calculated that amount?

Ah sorry I should have just said "3 main / larger scale funders" (op, eaif + meta funding circle). Funders from those groups include individuals.

But I was also unclear in my comment - I'll clarify this soon.

There actually is a lot stopping people from doing this independently - if you would ever want to scale and get funding you basically have 3 sources of funders, and if they don't approve what you are doing you won't get to become a serious competitor

I agree he's not offering alternatives, as I mentioned previously. It would be good if Leif gave examples of better tradeoffs. 

I still think your claim is too strongly stated. I don't think Leif criticizing GW orgs means he is discouraging life saving aid as a whole, or that people will predictably die as a result. The counterfactual is not clear (and it's very difficult to measure). 

More defensible claims would be :

• People are less likely to donate to GW recommended orgs
• People will be more skeptical of bednets / (any intervention he critiques) and less likely to support organization implementing them
• People will be less likely to donate to AMF / New Incentives / (any other org he specifically discussed or critiqued)
• People may be more skeptical of LMIC philanthropy more generally because they feel overwhelmed by the possible risks, and donate less to it (this statement is closest to your original claim. For what it's worth, this is his least original claim and people already have many reasons to be skeptical, so I'd be wary of attributing too much credit to Leif here) 

I didn't read the article you linked, I think it's plausible. (see more in my last para) 

I'd like to address your second paragraph in more depth though: 

He's clearly discouraging people from donating to GiveWell's recommendations. This will predictably result in more people dying. I don't see how you can deny this. 

I don't think GW recommendations are the only effective charities out there, so I don't think this is an open-and-shut case.

• GW's selection criteria for charities includes, amongst other things, room for more funding. So if an org has only $1M RFMF, regardless of how cost effective the org was, GW wouldn't recommend them because they are looking to recommend charities with some bar (I believe at least 10s of millions, possibly more) of funding.
• A number of CE orgs estimate their impact could be as cost-effective, or more (with higher uncertainty of course!) than GW top recommended charities. They could also just donate to non-EA affiliated charities that are more / as cost effective as GW charities.
• GW also has it's own limited scope, which I think plausible result in them missing out on some impactful opportunities e.g. relating to policy interventions and orgs working on growth (ala Growth and the case against randomista development). 

 FWIW if helpful what my own views here are - I think I'm a lot more risk neutral than GW, and much more keen to expand beyond GW's scope of GH&D interventions. GW is ultimately 1 org with it's own priorities, perspectives and, biases. I'd love to see more work in this space taking different perspectives (e.g. The case of the missing cause prioritisation research). 

Do you really think that general audiences reading his WIRED article will be no less likely to donate to effective charities as a result?

I'm sympathetic to this point (where i interpret effective charities as a superset of GW charities). I think it's plausible he's contributed to a new "overhead myth" re negative impacts of aid (although, keep in mind that this is a pre-existing narrative). I would have liked Wenar to talk more about what kinds of trade offs he would endorse making, examples of good trade-offs in practice, examples of actually bad trade-offs (rather than potentially bad ones), and, if he's very skeptical of aid, what he sees as other effective ways to help people in LMICs. It's possible he covers some of this in his other article. 

I agree with the omission bias point, but the second half of the paragraph seems unfair.

Leif never discourages people from doing philanthropy (or, aid as he calls it). Perhaps he might make people unduly skeptical of bednets in particular - which I think is reasonable to critique him on. 

But overall, he seems to just be advocating for people to be more critical of possible side effects from aid. From the article (bold mine)

Making responsible choices, I came to realize, means accepting well-known risks of harm. Which absolutely does not mean that “aid doesn’t work.” There are many good people in aid working hard on the ground, often making tough calls as they weigh benefits and costs. Giving money to aid can be admirable too—doctors, after all, still prescribe drugs with known side effects. Yet what no one in aid should say, I came to think, is that all they’re doing is improving poor people’s lives.

This comment is mostly about the letter, not the wired article. I don't think this letter is particularly well argued (see end of article for areas of disagreement), but I'm surprised by the lack of substantive engagement with it. 

This is fairly rough, i'm sure i've made mistakes in here, but figured it's better to share than not. 

Here’s some stuff i think is reasonable (but would love for folks to chime in if i'm missing something) 

• Questioning GiveWell's $4500 estimate - seems worth questioning! I am no expert in developmental economics, but it seems like Leif made some reasonable points regarding how to measure counterfactuals, Shapley values, the other non-AMF actors who helped get the bednets from conception to creation. Maybe all these points have been covered in places, but I'd be really surprised if everyone reading and engaging in his writing knows the answers (at least for myself, I don't!)
  • I'd be curious how many of people who donate to GiveWell take this number at face value / how many of us have really thought critically about this number
  • My friend with a background in dev econ says that EAs seem to take the $ estimates a lot more seriously than development economists in general. That seems worth reflecting on and learning more about. 
• He suggested GiveWell ask external developmental economists to evaluate their research / impact
  • this sounds great! +1 to this. 
• I think his red flags were all reasonable and things I'd be on the lookout for (the red flags were: seeking confirmation from within the group, attacking credibility of outsiders, distorting criticisms/vilifying critics,  ‘Am I afraid that I’ll lose friends if I question certain things about EA?’)
  • I don't think all of those things are all as big risks as Leif perhaps does - but I do think that these things are present to some degree, and we should take them seriously.
  • I think, on average, we should be encouraging people to form independent beliefs and testing their theories on the world (and getting it wrong! and learning from the mistakes! and not worrying so much about maximizing at all costs!) much more than we currently do.
  • Also, others have written with similar perspectives (e.g. On Living Without Idols  and It's ok to leave EA )
• I am sympathetic to his claim that there is a lot of focus on intermediate steps for LT & meta impact, but that's not really the claim he's making.
  • However, GH&D and animal orgs do often communicate actual impact. You can always argue that they calculated the impact incorrectly - but I don't think they look at intermediate steps.
• i think the nerd scouts suggestion is understandable given that that the Atlas fellowship was a very prominent high school outreach program, and a very large % of CB resources go to uni outreach, and Leif is a Stanford professor where there has been a lot of EA activity for many years.
  • I think this section could have been written with a bit less attitude
  • I am actually pretty bullish on getting younger people (college/ late high school) to really focus more on scout mindset / general decision-making tools & solid career advice. IDK if Leif is suggesting exactly that, but I do think that's pretty important
  • Otherwise, I think I mostly disagree with him on his higher level strategy. It would be hard to know from the outside, but a number of projects have been started doing mid- and late-career outreach that are pretty exciting, and I hope more will be started in the coming years.  
• I read GiveWell's response to the wired article, and I do think overall it's not as direct as it could be.
  • both he and GW are weirdly not addressing the fishing thing directly - GW did not directly link their 2016 response in their notes (it's linked from the info page on bednets, but you have to search for it), and Leif didn't in either of his posts. am slightly confused on both parties' actions here. 

Things I'm not very sympathetic to in his argument: 

• overall, there are a lot of points, and not all of them are made equally well
  • I think if any of the points i mention above were the focus and written with a tiny bit more rigor, they would be valuable additions to discourse
• little quibbles
  • Comparing EA to scientology. Feels like there were better and more fair analogies. I think overall this is a theme with his writing, which is unfortunate because it upsets people.
  • some of the narrative about lots of money / EA funding lots of prizes and competitions would have been more relevant pre-FTX collapse)
• The effective vs altruism section feels a bit too abstract to be useful to me, and similar arguments have been made within the community numerous times, especially post FTX. But, fair critique given FTX. (Maybe there's a lesson to be learnt here about how these ideas are perceived externally, clearly there's a lot of comms work we need to do)
• the tone (of the article more so than the letter) is a bit aggressive - Leif is aware of this but i disagree with his reasons. I think he could have made a much stronger and more convincing argument without being that aggressive. In fact, if such an article existed I would share it widely and want to engage in discussions on it !
• didn't feel like a very balanced view of the impact EA has had - he does mention that farmed animal welfare + lead projects, but i think he could have done a little more digging, especially when making some really deep critiques. I would be curious as to what he thinks when looking across the board at what has happened (another comms improvement note, perhaps) 

It's much easier to fundraise for GH&D (less "weird" / more legible)

Thanks for your time Lizka! As someone who has shared a bunch of feedback on the forum, I appreciated your willingness to always engage and stay curious.

Moderation is one of important and invisible jobs where it's really hard to please everyone. i think you / the team did a really good job in what was probably the hardest period of time to be a mod on this forum.

+1 and I'd go further - I think that "steady hands" are even more critical at the leadership level.