If you didn’t see it after two read-throughs, I don’t think I’ll be able to make a summary that conveys the relevance.
Maybe these excerpts draw it out a bit?
Worker: “Do you think any charity other than us would have run the calculation we did, and then actually believe the result? Or would they have fudged the numbers here and there, and when even a calculation with fudged numbers indicated that the intervention was ineffective, come up with a reason to discredit this calculation and replace it with a different one that got the result they wanted?”
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Carl: “Why don’t you just run a more effective charity, and advertise on that? Then you can outcompete the other charities.”
Worker: “That’s not fashionable anymore. The ‘effectiveness’ branding has been tried before; donors are tired of it by now. Perhaps this is partially because there aren’t functional systems that actually check which organizations are effective and which aren’t, so scam charities branding themselves as effective end up outcompeting the actually effective ones. And there are organizations claiming to evaluate charities’ effectiveness, but they’ve largely also become scams by now, for exactly the same reasons. The fashionable branding now is environmentalism.”
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Carl: “How do you even deal with this?”
Worker: “It’s already the reality you’ve lived in your whole life. The only adjustment is to realize it, and be able to talk about it, without this destroying your ability to participate in the act when it’s necessary to do so. Maybe functional information-processing institutions will be built someday, but we are stuck with this situation for now, and we’ll have no hope of building functional institutions if we don’t understand our current situation.”
If you didn’t see it after two read-throughs, I don’t think I’ll be able to make a summary that conveys the relevance.
Maybe these excerpts draw it out a bit?
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