In September, we announced the Change Our Mind Contest for critiques of our cost-effectiveness analyses. Today, we’re excited to announce the winners!
We’re very grateful that so many people engaged deeply with our work. This contest was GiveWell’s most successful effort so far to solicit external criticism from the public, and it wouldn’t have been possible without the participation of people who share our goal of allocating funding to cost-effective programs.
Overall, we received 49 entries engaging with our prompts. We were very happy with the quality of entries we received—their authors brought a great deal of thought and expertise to engaging with our cost-effectiveness analyses.
Because we were impressed by the quality of entries, we’ve decided to award two first-place prizes and eight honorable mentions. (We stated in September that we would give a minimum of one first-place, one runner-up, and one honorable mention prize.) We also awarded $20,000 to the piece of criticism that inspired this contest.
Winners are listed below, followed by our reflections on this contest and responses to the winners.
The prize-winners
Given the overall quality of the entries we received, selecting a set of winners required a lot of deliberation.
We’re still in the process of determining which critiques to incorporate into our cost-effectiveness analyses and to what extent they’ll change the bottom line; we don’t agree with all the critiques in the first-place and honorable mention entries, but each prize-winner raised issues that we believe were worth considering. In several cases, we plan to further investigate the questions raised by these entries.
Within categories, the winners are listed alphabetically by the last name of the author who submitted the entry.
First-place prizes – $20,000 each1Both of these entries were outstanding, and they represent very different approaches. Because they are similarly excellent, we are naming two winners rather than one winner and one runner-up. jQuery(‘#footnote_plugin_tooltip_14065_1_1’).tooltip({ tip: ‘#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_14065_1_1’, tipClass: ‘footnote_tooltip’, effect: ‘fade’, predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: ‘top right’, relative: true, offset: [10, 10], });
Noah Haber for “GiveWell’s Uncertainty Problem.” The author argues that without properly accounting for uncertainty, GiveWell is likely to allocate its portfolio of funding suboptimally, and proposes methods for addressing uncertainty.
Matthew Romer and Paul Romer Present for “An Examination of GiveWell’s Water Quality Intervention Cost-Effectiveness Analysis.” The authors suggest several changes to GiveWell’s analysis of water