User:Vipul/Holden Karnofsky

Holden Karnofsky is a co-founder and co-executive director of charity evaluator GiveWell and one of three Managing Directors the Open Philanthropy Project, a spinoff of a collaboration between GiveWell and Good Ventures.

Before GiveWell
Karnofsky graduated from Harvard University with a degree in social science in 2003. He then went on to work at the Westport, Connecticut-based hedge fund Bridgewater Associates. Some of his work at the hedge fund got mentioned in financial newspaper ''Barron's.

At Bridgewater Associates, Karnofsky met his future GiveWell co-founder Elie Hassenfeld. In 2006, Karnofsky and Hassenfeld started a charity club where they and other Bridgewater employees pooled in money and investigated the best charities to donate the money to. In mid-2007, they formed a fund called the Clear Fund, using donations from their colleagues, and quit their jobs to work full time on GiveWell, whose goal was to allocate the money in the Clear Fund to the best charities.

GiveWell and the Open Philanthropy Project
Karnofsky's early attempts to market GiveWell ran into trouble when, in December 2007, he was discovered posting a question about the organization to MetaFilter using another individual's name, and then posting an answer about GiveWell without his own name but without disclosing his affiliation with GiveWell. The negative publicity led Karnofsky to resign from the role of Executive Director, and the Board cut $5000 form his salary to pay for a professional development course he would be required to take. The incident had negative repercussions on GiveWell's reputation for months to come, but in May 2008 Karnofsky confidently told Fast Company that, past incidents notwithstanding, GiveWell continued to have valuable insights to offer to the domain of nonprofit evaluation and its forthcoming fundraising rounds would focus on that.

Karnofsky was later reinstated in his role as Executive Director.

Under Karnofsky's leadership, the annual money moved to GiveWell-recommended charities increased from $1.6 million in 2010 to $28 million in 2015.

Karnofksy is one of three Managing Directors of The Open Philanthropy Project, an outgrowth of GiveWell Labs (a collaboration between GiveWell and Good Ventures) which is scheduled to spin off from GiveWell in late 2015.

Public writing and speeches
In addition to his public writing and outreach as an official representative of GiveWell, Karnofsky has also engaged personally with many ideas and people in the effective altruism community. An article by Dylan Matthews about effective altruism for Vox included many comments from Karnofsky about particular cause areas as well as about the overall consequentialist moral philosophy that motivated him.

Karnofsky has shared his thoughts on career choices for people who seek to do good in an interview with Benjamin Todd for 80,000 Hours as well as elsewhere.

In May 2012, Karnofsky also wrote a critique of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (then called the Singularity Institute) on LessWrong, a rationalist community website started by MIRI co-founder Eliezer Yudkowsky and supported partly by MIRI. The critique, although not written in an official capacity representing GiveWell, provided context into why Karnofsky and his GiveWell colleagues did not consider the problem of unfriendly artificial intelligence as pressing a concern as those at MIRI did. However, subsequently, as part of work on the Open Philanthropy Project, he shifted in the direction of taking artificial intelligence concerns more seriously, as described in a March 2015 GiveWell blog post.

In 2013, Karnofsky gave a speech at the Harvard University Class of 2003 Reunion, where he made a number of wry remarks about Harvard University life. He also used a class survey to make comments about the life trajectories of Harvard alumni and their philanthropic contributions.