For donors who think of themselves as giving not only to help the charity in question but to help GiveWell, we encourage allocating your dollars in the same way that you would ideally like to see the broader GiveWell community allocate its dollars. If every GiveWell follower follows this principle, we’ll end up with an overall allocation that reflects a weighted average of followers’ opinions of the appropriate allocation. (By contrast, if every GiveWell follower reasons “My personal donation won’t hit diminishing returns, so I’ll just give exclusively to my top choice,” the overall allocation is more likely to end up “distorted.”)
Effective altruists’ decisions don’t correlate with most philanthropists’, but effective altruists’ decisions correlate with each other. So this may have been an appropriate time to use timeless reasoning.
Holden Karnofsky used similar reasoning in his charity recommendations for 2012:
Effective altruists’ decisions don’t correlate with most philanthropists’, but effective altruists’ decisions correlate with each other. So this may have been an appropriate time to use timeless reasoning.
I think in that case it’s less that we’re effective altruists and more that we’re accepting GiveWell’s recommendations.