There is a huge difference between these two but people often think both of these make an organization open to feedback.

Studies have shown that people are convenience maximizers and want to put in as little effort as possible. If something is a step harder there is generally a huge drop off rate. For example if you ask someone to give feedback but make it inconvenient or subtly discourage it, the amount of real feedback you get will be a small fraction of what would have been given if it was easy.

If I wanted to make it seem like I was accepting feedback but I did not really want to receive or take into account large amounts of feedback (particularly negative feedback), I could do a number of things

• I could discourage feedback by:
  
• only accepting positive feedback
  
• trivializing the feedback and making it seem unimportant
  
• trying to censor negative public feedback
  
• I could make it inconvenient to give feedback by:
  
• asking others to only send me feedback privately
  
• only accepting feedback from “chosen experts” who I personally pick
  
• mainly putting my content on pages without the ability for others to comment
  
• only telling the public about projects after their completion
  
• responding to feedback very slowly so that the person giving feedback loses interest
  
• I could make it unpleasant to give feedback by:
  
• having a strong negative reaction (e.g. sadness, anger, defensiveless) to negative feedback
  
• lashing back against those who give negative feedback (e.g. writing or saying negative things about what they are doing because of the feedback they have given)
  
• holding grudges against individuals or organizations that give negative feedback
  

If I see an organization doing these kinds of actions in regards to feedback, I get the sense that they do not really want to improve based off others' suggestions. Taking negative feedback in particular can be hard but its an important skill to learn and it allows ideas to be improved much faster. We will never be able to solve the really important problems if we cannot admit that we are not doing everything perfectly.

Organizational self-confidence is seen as a very positive trait and is often embraced by new start-ups and nonprofits. The concept of self-skepticism is arguably as important but often more neglected. Self-skepticism cautions us to clearly measure our impact before declaring ourselves effective or expanding our organization. We believe that if a healthy dose of this was applied to the charity sector would make the world a much better place much faster. 

Below is an outline of our organizational self-skepticism checklist. It breaks down into two main categories: (1) do not assume a priori that the organization is better than the evidence suggests, and (2) constantly seek and use critical feedback.

Organization does not assume that they are better than the evidence suggests

1. Not assuming they are far outside the base rate or norm without strong evidence.
   
2. Not assuming that the average and the marginal organizational impact will be the same.
   
3. Only seeking major funding/expansion/scaling once there is evidence of impact.
   
4. Individuals within the organization being skeptical about personal impact until proven otherwise.
   
5. Being very careful not to generalize strength in one area to strength in many/all areas.
   
6. Not assuming they are having a large impact in all unquantified areas.
   

Organization seeks and uses critical feedback

1. Being transparent and seeking feedback on their work.
   
2. Being clear with the public about their goals,objective and plans and seeking feedback on them.
   
3. Seeking public feedback from critically minded others about their organization and core strategy, and sharing this information publicly.
   
4. Getting external reviews and impact evaluations written by critically minded people not working with or for the organization.
   
5. Applying major changes when negative results come back from external or internal reviews.
   
6. Encouraging feedback on organization and addressing it instead of ignoring or squashing it.
   
7. Keeping open the possibility of shutting down if its impact is not proven
   

We feel as though one of the largest realizations that has made us far more effective was when we started applying a much stronger self-skepticism to our own ideas. Often we can be harsh and critical when it comes to others’ ideas but have a much harder time seriously evaluating our own impact.

What are DALYs

Disability Adjusted Life-Years (DALYs) are a measure of how many years of healthy life are lost due to early death or debilitating condition. According to the WHO, “the sum of these DALYs across the population, or the burden of disease, can be thought of as a measurement of the gap between current health status and an ideal health situation where the entire population lives to an advanced age, free of disease and disability.” 

Years of life lost is calculated with respect to the average life expectancy at birth. Each disability is given a weight which is multiplied by the years spent living with the disease. E.g. blindness has a disability weight of 0.6, so if you were blind for twenty years that would mean that you have lost 0.6 x 20 = 12 DALYs.

To get the weightings for the disabilities, they brought it to a panel of judges and asked them to give them a weighting from 0 to 1. A weight of 1 meant that they would be indifferent between having the condition and being dead, compared to 0 where one would be indifferent between having the condition and having perfect health. 

Uses

Comparison
It gives a single metric to all of the different diseases, which allows you to find the more cost effective ways to help a population. This helps policy-makers and donors make the difficult decision of who to prioritize with limited resources. 

An important cause
Health is an important cause to focus on. There is much research finding that ill people and countries with high disease burdens are unhappier than their healthier counterparts. 

Additionally, illness is just inherently bad. You have but to recall your own experiences of being ill to confirm this fact. 


Potential flaws

Environmental context
Being blind in Nigeria is worse than being blind in the Netherlands. This is because in the Netherlands there are support systems in place, such as braille and audiobooks. Most of the blind in Nigeria do not get this support. This means that the disability weighting that is assigned to blindness should be different in Nigeria and the Netherlands. However, in the interests of fairness, DALYs are equally weighted everywhere. 

This is not a deal-breaker as all social metrics are slightly flawed.  It is simply something to keep in mind.

Additionally it is still probably the case that treating blindness in Nigeria is a lot less costly than treating blindness in the Netherlands. 


A million spilled lattes
Spilling a latte sucks. You’ve just paid more than you should for a delicious drink and now it’s all wasted. Depending on the severity of your caffeine addiction, you go and buy another one or get on with your day. What a drag. 

However, if I had the choice of preventing a billion lattes being spilled by a billion different people, or saving one single child from dying of malaria, I’d choose the child. And I'm not sure there's any number of lattes that would change my mind

This is because I am a prioritarian. This means I’m like a utilitarian in that I want to maximize happiness and minimize suffering, but with the added rule of prioritizing those less well off. This is because I think that helping the poor is more important than helping the rich, and that helping well-off people while I could be helping the starving seems wrong. 

Again, this does not invalidate DALYs; it just means that you have to be careful when reading findings on them. If you consider yourself a prioritarian, you have to check that the DALYs are helping those who really need your help, not just people in New York who have back pain. 


What about non-health issues?
DALYs do not take into account the pain of social ostracization. For example a cleft lip simply means your face came out a bit wrong and your lip looks bizarre. It can make it slightly harder to eat and talk, but compared to cancer or a heart attack it’s not so bad, so the disability weighting is very small.

What that misses out on is that in many cultures people with cleft lips are ostracized from society. They are not accepted by their family, they are thought to be cursed, and they can find it impossible to make friends or to have their own family. This is devastating. Social isolation is one of the saddest, most lonely things that can happen to a human being. 

This is an important issue about DALYs, however on average you can make a larger difference if you know what you’re doing instead of going forward blindly, and DALYs allow us to see our progress. Unfortunately there isn’t a widely used happiness metric that we can use yet that I know of. (Although please do inform me if there is one.) More on this argument can be read on this excellent article by Adam Casey.