I like that this question allows to some extent to incorporate discussions about EA’s blindspots in ‘messy’ processes like politics / institutional change etc. by asking what to do in such areas.
I’m skeptical of the blindspot claim, e.g. there’s a decade-old 80K article listing the wide variety of efforts by EAs working on systemic change even then.
Thanks for sharing! This actually updates my understanding of the community a bit, am excited to go deeper on this. I saw a few other folks here also talking about that blindspot. Would be curious to know whether they (like me) were simply unaware, or whether there’s still serious reasons to think we’re underappreciating the murky areas beyond strict experimental control.
I think it’s more so the latter. Scott Alexander’s ACX Grants gives to a ton of systemic change-flavored stuff (see here), Charity Entrepreneurship / AIM has launched a fair number of orgs that aren’t RCT-based direct delivery charities (policy, effective giving, evaluators, etc), etc to say nothing of longtermist and meta cause areas for which strict experimental control isn’t possible at all.
“At high levels of uncertainty, common sense produces better outcomes than explicit modelling”
I like that this question allows to some extent to incorporate discussions about EA’s blindspots in ‘messy’ processes like politics / institutional change etc. by asking what to do in such areas.
I’m skeptical of the blindspot claim, e.g. there’s a decade-old 80K article listing the wide variety of efforts by EAs working on systemic change even then.
Thanks for sharing! This actually updates my understanding of the community a bit, am excited to go deeper on this.
I saw a few other folks here also talking about that blindspot. Would be curious to know whether they (like me) were simply unaware, or whether there’s still serious reasons to think we’re underappreciating the murky areas beyond strict experimental control.
I think it’s more so the latter. Scott Alexander’s ACX Grants gives to a ton of systemic change-flavored stuff (see here), Charity Entrepreneurship / AIM has launched a fair number of orgs that aren’t RCT-based direct delivery charities (policy, effective giving, evaluators, etc), etc to say nothing of longtermist and meta cause areas for which strict experimental control isn’t possible at all.