I mean, I guess that is sort of encouraging, if you personally are a scientist, since it suggests you can do good work yourself. But it doesnât offer me much sense that I who am not a scientist will ever in fact be able to trust very much outside established theory in the hard sciences, unless you think better methodology is going to become used nearly always by the big reputable orgs and journals. (I mean I already mostly didnât have trust, but I kind of hoped GiveWell were relying on the minority of actually solid stuff.)
Obviously, âdonât trust anythingâ could just be the right conclusion, and people should say it if itâs true! But itâs hard not to get disheartened about giving, if the messages is âdonât trust any research before c.2015, or also a lot of it afterward, even from the most apparently reliable and skeptical sources, and also, even good research produced now often has little external validity, so probably donât trust that the good current stuff tells you much about what will happen going forward, eitherâ.
I mean, I guess that is sort of encouraging, if you personally are a scientist, since it suggests you can do good work yourself. But it doesnât offer me much sense that I who am not a scientist will ever in fact be able to trust very much outside established theory in the hard sciences, unless you think better methodology is going to become used nearly always by the big reputable orgs and journals. (I mean I already mostly didnât have trust, but I kind of hoped GiveWell were relying on the minority of actually solid stuff.)
Obviously, âdonât trust anythingâ could just be the right conclusion, and people should say it if itâs true! But itâs hard not to get disheartened about giving, if the messages is âdonât trust any research before c.2015, or also a lot of it afterward, even from the most apparently reliable and skeptical sources, and also, even good research produced now often has little external validity, so probably donât trust that the good current stuff tells you much about what will happen going forward, eitherâ.