It occured to me that we prob have enough people posting at the moment to do a bit of rudimentary charity research ourselves. I got a flyer recently for Sight Savers International, which sounded quite promising. They cure trachoma, allegedly for about 50p per person. They describe trachoma as something extremely painful which causes eventual blindness.

Superficially that sounds a lot better than Fred Hollows, Toby Ord's top charity, who IIRC cure cataracts (which I believe aren't painful) for £20.

I've checked Givewell's site, and they haven't assessed them, so I was thinking of giving them a call next week, to ask a few preliminary questions or ask them to direct me to docs that answer them (I might be able to solve some of these in advance with some online research).

1) What proportion of trachomas lead to blindness?
2) Does the 50p treatment provide a permanent one-off cure, or are there follow-up costs?
3) How do you divide the donations between your projects (they also mention protecting from river blindness and cataract operations) and if so, how's it divided, and is it possible to direct donations?

I'm a complete amateur at this, so I'm hoping people will pitch in with suggestions, possibly including 'here's a good reason why this is obviously not going to achieve anything, so don't waste your time.'

I don't see us competing with Givewell/Giving What We Can (nor can I see why we'd want to), but it would be nice if we could complement the work they're doing.

Arepo, thanks for taking initiative here.

Regarding your questions: as you say, there's probably lots of information on the web and in academic articles) -- you might try searching on the Disease Control Priorities Project site, for instance. When you call, make sure to ask not just about trachoma in the abstract, but about what Sight Savers International has specifically accomplished in the past, which is key. Perhaps GiveWell has a more complete list of questions to ask charities -- you might inquire with them.

In fact, if you're planning to spend more than an hour or two on this, I would recommend contacting GiveWell anyway to coordinate your research, so that they can help you out and perhaps make your results more widely available. GiveWell is able to do the kind of work you're suggesting on a large scale, so their results may be more systematic. So it might actually be most effective to ask them what projects they would like help with, so that you can reduce their research burden, rather than investigating something that (unfortunately) will only be seen by the few of us here at Felicifia.

Or, if your time is convertible to money at a reasonable rate, you might consider making money to donate to GiveWell, rather than volunteering. Holden commented on this point for general charities in one blog post.

Ta Alan. I prob should approach Givewell, I'm just always wary of sending emails to impersonal addresses. There's a few things going on here,too - one is that I work in publishing, which is about as low salary:skill ratio as any industry I know of.

Another is that we're still hoping to expand this forum beyond the dedicated few, to attract more casual consequentialists. If we manage, then it would be great to get even a fraction of us doing this kind of thing, so I'm vaguely hoping to set an example.

Lastly, I'm hoping it might help bring more people here if we can offer some of this kind of info.

Building the forum by getting participation here makes sense.

Regarding other ways to turn time on the Internet into value, you might consider contributing to Wikipedia, especially in utilitarian-relevant ways. For instance, GiveWell has some new top-rated charities: VillageReach and Stop Tuberculosis Partnership. The first doesn't have a Wikipedia entry yet. To the page for the second, one could add a quick note mentioning that GiveWell recommended them for such and such reason, as I did for Partners in Health. This serves both to highlight GiveWell and to point out how effective the charity is. Research is only as useful as the number of people who know about it, so publicizing GiveWell's results to new audiences is highly useful.

There are lots of other Wikipedia articles to which you might find it worthwhile to add information. For instance, I'm interested in the question of which animals can feel pain, so when I read a study relevant to that question, I like to add references about it to Wikipedia's entry for that animal. In general, if you read something you think is important, and if there's a legitimate place for it in a Wikipedia entry, you might consider adding it.

Hey guys. Now I can see advantages and disadvantages of Arepo's suggestion. While assessing a new charity may be interesting, it will not be equally valuable as the same study done by an organisation like GiveWell. It's advantageous for charities to be evaluated in a single place with a fairly consistent method.

But even if we leave the Sight Savers discussion to the experts, I think we might have a very interesting role to play.
I suggest that we should compare the outcomes of different approaches. We can make comparisons more audacious than any other organisation. How does the prevention of an unwanted pregnancy compare with a Disability Adjusted Life Year? What about a reduction in carbon emission? How would this compare to the promotion of secular or ethical values?

GiveWell outlines five broad categories for developing world aid:
1. health
2. economic
3. education
4. surgery
5. water

While Toby Ord favours 4, Givewell gives a strong rebuke, stating that there is a bottleneck not in funding but in developing world surgeons. It says that surgical charities do not provide sufficient funding to the training of new surgeons. Rather, it spends too much money distributing developing world surgeons towards its particular region e.g. eyes in the case of the Fred Hollows Foundation.

I find the idea of increasing world health frightening since it might increase world population. However, this seems a rare view. A key writing identified by Peter Unger on the topic of population is Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen's Population, Delusion and Reality. Sen's name just keeps appearing in reply to my objection, the Malthusian Objection so I recognise that once I get serious about these things, I must read his work.

RyanCarey wrote:I find the idea of increasing world health frightening since it might increase world population.

I've heard mixed evidence about whether poverty reduction increases or decreases population. However, if that's a concern, perhaps one could promote charities like Population Services International, which aim to reduce poverty through family planning and prevent HIV transmission through condom use.