Strongly agree. Having been on both sides of the policy advocacy fence (i.e. in government and as a consultant/​advocate working from the ouside), policy ideas have to be concrete. Asking the government to improve disease surveillance (as opposed to something specific like e.g. implementing threatnet) is about as useful as asking a government to improve education outcomes by improving pedagogy, or to boost the economy by raising productivity.
Of course, you don’t have to be an expert yourself per se, but you have to talk to those who are, and get their inputs—and beyond a certain point, if your knowledge of that specific space becomes great enough after working in it for a long time, you’re practically an expert yourself.
While EA is great, a lot of us have naive views of how governance works, and for that matter have overly optimistic theories of change of how abstract ideas and research affect actual policies and resource allocation, let alone welfare.
Strongly agree. Having been on both sides of the policy advocacy fence (i.e. in government and as a consultant/​advocate working from the ouside), policy ideas have to be concrete. Asking the government to improve disease surveillance (as opposed to something specific like e.g. implementing threatnet) is about as useful as asking a government to improve education outcomes by improving pedagogy, or to boost the economy by raising productivity.
Of course, you don’t have to be an expert yourself per se, but you have to talk to those who are, and get their inputs—and beyond a certain point, if your knowledge of that specific space becomes great enough after working in it for a long time, you’re practically an expert yourself.
While EA is great, a lot of us have naive views of how governance works, and for that matter have overly optimistic theories of change of how abstract ideas and research affect actual policies and resource allocation, let alone welfare.