Harnessing Big Data for Social Good, YC-Backed Nonprofit Bayes Impact Launches | Hacker News Reader

Harnessing Big Data for Social Good, YC-Backed Nonprofit Bayes Impact Launches

techcrunch.com

56 pointsajiang5 comments

The article mentions "Keyspring" as the YC alumnus donor. I'm guessing they mean the great guys at Teespring instead.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7629630

We've contacted the writer multiple times on this. Big thanks to Walker and Teespring on their awesome generosity!

I think it's unfortunate that "good" and "nonprofit" are so closely linked in the popular imagination. Profitable enterprises deserve the benefit of the doubt: they do good unless proven otherwise. (It is often otherwise; it's likely, for example, that firms such as Coke and McDonald's—not to mention banks and many other financial firms—do net harm.) On the other hand, nonprofits—by definition lacking profit—have no such a priori evidence of doing good. They thus deserve extra scrutiny.

In order to be able to evaluate nonprofits more accurately, it would be helpful if they answered the following questions:

(1) What are your goals?

(2) What would constitute meeting your goals?

(3) What is an acceptable cost (in time, money, and attention) to achieve your goals?

(4) What are your plans if you fail to meet your goals at an acceptable cost?

(5) If you end up doing more harm than good, how will you know, and what do you plan to do about it?

I'd thought that pmarca's comment here was hyperbole, but apparently it's fairly true these days:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8024239

Anyway, to respond to your comment, non-profits have to file articles of incorporation and bylaws with the state when they incorporate:

http://www.idealist.org/info/Nonprofits/Gov3

Among the information necessary is the purpose of the organization, which answers #1-2 of your questions. In practice, #3-5 are decided by fundraising activities of the organization; it is part of a donor's due diligence to ensure that the non-profits she donates to are the most effective places she can find to employ her capital. Non-profits that can't convince donors of this end up going out of business.

Your aim is off the mark. The comment by pmarca says

How did Hacker News evolve from the discussion board for YC, to the discussion board where the first comment on any post involving a YC company is reliably someone crapping on it? What an amazing shift.

My comment was even-toned and didn't criticize any organization in particular. If writing that "[nonprofits] thus deserve extra scrutiny" constitutes "crapping on" anything, we are operating under very different definitions of what it means to crap on something.

(Bayes Impact has explicitly aligned themselves with the social justice movement; if I'd crapped on them, you'd have known it. Instead, I tried to write as even-handed a comment as I could while still making my point. Indeed, it took several edits to remove all traces of snark. I've been rewarded for my efforts with downvotes and a reprimand. This is not the way to foster reasoned discussion.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com