My notes on what I liked about the post, from the announcement:
This piece starts off very well, with the authors explaining which claims they actually mean to defend and how strongly they support those claims. I also appreciated the rest of the outline in the introduction.
A lot of writing about effective altruism argues that more research should be done on a given cause. “Randomista development” goes further by making explicit predictions about the value of additional research:
“A ~4 person-year research effort will find donation opportunities working on economic growth in LMICs which are substantially better than GiveWell’s top charities from a current generation human welfare-focused point of view.”
The rest of the piece is well-written and uses a lot of helpful graphics, but my favorite part came at the end, where the authors give a fair accounting of a number of counterarguments, some of which are even accepted as being partly true!
This post was awarded an EA Forum Prize; see the prize announcement for more details.
My notes on what I liked about the post, from the announcement: