If GiveWell donors largely aren’t checking whether GiveWell’s recommendations are reasonable, this is good reason to suspect that GiveWell’s donors aren’t buying what they mean to buy.
One assumes that having a few people do sanity checks on randomly selected pieces of their work is good enough, plus one assumes that Givewell isn’t capable of a stealthy transformation into an evil organisation overnight without anyone on the inside raising the alarm.
Put another way, by doing this donor lottery thing, you giving Givewell a 1⁄10 rating already. It would be like my implicit 1⁄10 rating of the local supermarkets if I start growing my own food. Charity recommendations is their job! It’s what they specialised in! If you have to spend a lot of time DIYing it, then they suck!
One assumes that having a few people do sanity checks on randomly selected pieces of their work is good enough, plus one assumes that Givewell isn’t capable of a stealthy transformation into an evil organisation overnight without anyone on the inside raising the alarm.
Put another way, by doing this donor lottery thing, you giving Givewell a 1⁄10 rating already. It would be like my implicit 1⁄10 rating of the local supermarkets if I start growing my own food. Charity recommendations is their job! It’s what they specialised in! If you have to spend a lot of time DIYing it, then they suck!