Misleading phrase in a GiveWell Youtube ad

Hi, Thomas,

We agree that the language you highlight is misleading, and we're sorry that it was included in the ad. It wasn't a part of the copy we provided to advertisers, and we didn't notice it in our review of the ad before it went live.

We're now speaking to the agency that coordinates these ads about the possibility of updating the video, but we think this is unlikely to happen, as the ad has already been live as is for some time and can't easily be reuploaded.

Thank you for bringing this to our attention!

Best,

Miranda (GiveWell Communications Associate)

Did you reach out directly to GiveWell? They are pretty responsive in my opinion.

In my view, the text should at least read "potentially" save because read literally it does say the vitamin A dose does save the recipient.

I hear the more general concern, but high fidelity is tough in a short ad -- and "$5000 will save an additional life" doesn't convey accurately to someone whose prior assumptions are that this is inefficient. So I am struggling to come up with better wording that is both literally accurate, concise, and accurately conveys HKI's relative value proposition.

My sense from what other YouTubers have said is that the norm is for YouTubers to send sponsors the video early so they can review it, and they are given broad guidelines rather than exactly what to say. I can imagine someone from GiveWell seeing this line and knowing it's (in spirit) wrong but it's not worth asking the person to re-do the whole ad read.

Yeah this seems pretty important to me, as it's about one of the key differences between EA and other charity (the strong emphasis on being rigourous about actual effectiveness). I saw something else similar to this recently, though can remember who from, and felt concerned about it, so glad to see you pointing this one out.

I think you intended to link to this instead of the 80K article at the top?