Hiya! I work on data stuff at CEA. I used to be the content lead on the EA Global team at CEA, and before that I did economic consulting. Here's an old website I might update at some point.
Think I'm making a mistake? Want to give me feedback? Here's my admonymous. You can also give feedback for me directly to my manager, Oscar Howie.
This is interesting, thanks for sharing! :)
I was browsing your BOTEC and wonder if I've found a bug or two in sheet 3 (but it's possible I'm not understanding something about your methodology, I only took a quick look / haven't read this post in detail).
On sheet 3, I think the weights are meant to basically represent how much money is being spent in each org + category, relative to the smallest org you look at? (W. M. Keck Foundation).
But it looks like you're not dividing the total weight per org by the number of focus areas that org has. So i.e. here I think here the weights for Wellcome > AMR should be =round(223.45 / 5), since you list 5 focus areas for Wellcome on sheet 1. I might be misunderstanding something here (only took a cursory check).
Also it looks like you're missing the Therapeutics category for Wellcome + Lab Readiness for Rockefeller, I think? (Maybe some others too).
I tried fixing this by making some changes (highlighted in green) here, mostly in sheet 3 (starting col L) and a bit in sheet 1. Happy to give you edit access if you request it.
Also sorry if this is too nitpicky, I just like auditing spreadsheets :) Thanks for publishing this!
Nice. Thanks for an incredibly prompt and thorough response!
But speaking for myself, I think the ideas-based outcomes are pretty inflated, and the behavioral outcomes are probably noisy rather than biased, so I believe our overall null on behavioral outcomes.
That makes sense to me. It is kind of interesting to me that the zeitgeist programs you mention are so different in terms of intervention size (if I'm understanding correctly, Safe Dates involved a 10 session curriculum, but the Men's Program involved a single session with a short video?), but neither seem effective at behavior reduction!
for instance, male subjects watch a video on sexual harassment and then teach a female confederate how to golf, while a researcher watches through a one-way mirror and codes how often the subject touches the confederate and how sexually harassing those touches were.
wow... oof...
Thank you for this summary + for conducting this research!
Super interesting, thanks for sharing! I have some possibly dumb questions about the finding that these programs don't change behaviors:
No pressure to respond, reading this made me curious about some other stuff:
This is a cool writeup! I really enjoyed reading it, thanks for sharing and congrats on failing fast on your first charity -- it sounds like you did a bunch of ambitious work and made a tough call fairly quickly :)
Things I like about your writing style:
Thanks, I found this a helpful nudge, and wouldn't have known about this otherwise :)