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 doesn’t 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 didn’t have trust, but I kind of hoped GiveWell were relying on the minority of actually solid stuff.)
Obviously, ‘don’t trust anything’ could just be the right conclusion, and people should say it if it’s true! But it’s hard not to get disheartened about giving, if the messages is “don’t 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 don’t trust that the good current stuff tells you much about what will happen going forward, either”.
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 doesn’t 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 didn’t have trust, but I kind of hoped GiveWell were relying on the minority of actually solid stuff.)
Obviously, ‘don’t trust anything’ could just be the right conclusion, and people should say it if it’s true! But it’s hard not to get disheartened about giving, if the messages is “don’t 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 don’t trust that the good current stuff tells you much about what will happen going forward, either”.