Yeah personally speaking, I don’t have very developed views on when to go with Spaghetti-wall vs RCT, so feel free to ignore the following which is more of a personal story. I’d guess there’s a bunch of ‘Giving Now vs Giving Later’ content lying around that’s much more relevant.
I think I used to be a lot more RCT because:
I was first motivated to take cost-effectiveness research seriously after hearing the Giving What We Can framing of “this data already exists, it’s just that it’s aimed at the health departments of LMICs rather than philanthropists”—that’s some mad low-hanging fruit right there (OTOH I seem to remember a bunch of friends wrestling with whether to fund Animal Charity Evaluators or ACE’s current best guesses—was existing cost-effectiveness research enough to go on yet?)
I was basically a student trying to change the world with a bunch of other students—surely the grown-ups mostly know what they’re doing and I should only expect to have better heuristics if there’s a ton of evidence behind them
My personality is very risk-averse
Over time, however:
I became more longtermist and there’s no GiveWell for longtermism
We grew up, and basically the more I saw of the rest of the world the less faith I had in people generally being sensible and altruistic and having their **** together
I recognised how much of my aversion to Spaghetti-wall is a personality thing [edit: maybe writing my undergrad dissertation on risk aversion in ethics made me acknowledge this more fully :P]
Yeah personally speaking, I don’t have very developed views on when to go with Spaghetti-wall vs RCT, so feel free to ignore the following which is more of a personal story. I’d guess there’s a bunch of ‘Giving Now vs Giving Later’ content lying around that’s much more relevant.
I think I used to be a lot more RCT because:
I was first motivated to take cost-effectiveness research seriously after hearing the Giving What We Can framing of “this data already exists, it’s just that it’s aimed at the health departments of LMICs rather than philanthropists”—that’s some mad low-hanging fruit right there (OTOH I seem to remember a bunch of friends wrestling with whether to fund Animal Charity Evaluators or ACE’s current best guesses—was existing cost-effectiveness research enough to go on yet?)
I was basically a student trying to change the world with a bunch of other students—surely the grown-ups mostly know what they’re doing and I should only expect to have better heuristics if there’s a ton of evidence behind them
My personality is very risk-averse
Over time, however:
I became more longtermist and there’s no GiveWell for longtermism
We grew up, and basically the more I saw of the rest of the world the less faith I had in people generally being sensible and altruistic and having their **** together
I recognised how much of my aversion to Spaghetti-wall is a personality thing [edit: maybe writing my undergrad dissertation on risk aversion in ethics made me acknowledge this more fully :P]