I mean one huge reason is logistics and uncertainty.
First we must come to the knowledge that yes, children actually are dying, and this death can be prevented with $5000. How do we prove that? How does the average person obtain this information? Well, a charitable foundation says so. Or some famous celebrity claims it to be true. Or some study, which the vast majority of humanity has never read or even heard about, claims it to be true.
Then we need to trust the charitable foundation to faithfully execute the plan to save the child. How do we know the plan will be faithfully executed?
An effective altruist is committed to finding and evaluating these answers. The vast majority of humanity is not. So Effective Altruism has made a bunch of claims, but can’t prove these claims in a 5 minute elevator pitch.
In the end then you’re just another charity asking for a leap of faith. Some people jump, others don’t. If you’re not asking for a leap of faith, you’re asking for a huge mental investment to verify all the claims made.
I’m sorry, but those are just excuses. Nobody requires claims to be “proven” beyond all possible doubt before making decisions that are plausibly (but not definitely) better for themselves (like going to college). They only demand such proof to get out of making decisions that are plausibly better for others.
Unless you’re a conspiracy theorist, you should probably think it more likely than not that reputable independent evaluators like GiveWell are legit. And then a >50% chance of saving lives for something on the order of ~$5000 is plainly sufficient to justify so acting. (Assuming that saving a life with certainty for ~$10k would obviously be choice-worthy.)
If one is unusually skeptical of life-saving interventions, the benefits of direct cash transfers (e.g. GiveDirectly) are basically undeniable. No “huge mental investment” or “leap of faith” required. (Unless by “leap of faith” you mean perfectly ordinary sorts of trust that go without saying in every other realm of life.)
>Unless you’re a conspiracy theorist, you should probably think it more likely than not that reputable independent evaluators like GiveWell are legit.
On what basis? Through thorough and methodical research? Or gut reaction? The research has a significant cost to it. Guts are notoriously unreliable.
Clearly the answer is not to just “Trust Charities”, because Effective Altruism claims that they are more effective than other charities.
>(Unless by “leap of faith” you mean perfectly ordinary sorts of trust that go without saying in every other realm of life.)
In the normal capitalist economy, I go to a restaurant. I pay for the meal. The meal is immediately served to me. There is a clear connection of reciprocity. There is a clear indication that the requested service was provided. There is a clear avenue of evaluation. I just put the food in my mouth. That’s where the trust comes from. You buy, receive, and evaluate the service through normal use and consumption.
In charitable giving, there is no easy feedback. I give the money to a charity and the money essentially goes into a black void. I obtain no immediate feedback on whether the charity rendered is effective or not, because the services are not delivered to me but to somebody else. I cannot directly observe what the money is being used for.
You’re conflating “charity” and “charity evaluator”. The whole point of independent evaluators is that other people can defer to their research. So yes, I think the answer is just “trust evaluators” (not “trust first-order charities”), the same way that someone wondering which supplements contain unsafe levels of lead should trust Consumer Reports.
If you are going to a priori refuse to trust research done by independent evaluators until you’ve personally vetted them for yourself, then you have made yourself incapable of benefiting from their efforts. Maybe there are low-trust societies where that’s necessary. But you’re going to miss out on a lot if you actually live in a high-trust society and just refuse to believe it.
But I don’t think people blindly defer to evaluators in other life domains either—or at least they shouldn’t for major decisions. For instance, there are fraudulent university accreditation agencies, non-fraudulent ones with rather low standards, ones with standards that are pretty orthogonal to whether you’ll get a good education, and so on.
I suggest that people more commonly rely on a social web of trust—one strand might be: College X looks good in the US News rankings, and I trust the US News rankings because the school guidance counselor thought it reliable, and the guidance counselor’s reputation in the broader school community is good. In reality, there are probably a couple of strands coming out from US News (e.g., my friends were talking about it) and from School X (e.g., I read about some successful alumni). So there’s a broader web to justify the trust placed in the US News evaluation, buttressed by sources in which the decisionmaker already had some confidence. Of course, the guidance counselor could be incompetent, my friends probably are ill-informed, and most schools have at least a few successful alumni. But people don’t have the time or energy to validate everything!
My guess is that for many people, GiveWell doesn’t have the outgoing linkages that US News does in my example. And it has some anti-linkages—e.g., one might be inclined to defer to Stanford professors, and of course one had some harsh things (unjustified in my opinion) to say about GiveWell. It comes up in the AI overview when I google’d “criticisms of Givewell,” so fairly low-hanging fruit that would likely come up on modest due diligence.
I’d also note that independent cannot be assumed and must be either taken on trust (probably through a web of trust) or sufficiently proven (which requires a fair amount of drilling).
My guess is that GiveWell is simply not enmeshed in John’s web of trust the way it is in yours or mine. Making and sustaining a widely trusted brand is hard, so that’s not surprising.
I agree with your first couple of paragraphs. That’s why my initial reply referred to “reputable independent evaluators like GiveWell”.
Conspiracy theorists do, of course, have their own distinct (and degenerate) “webs of trust”, which is why I also flagged that possibility. But mainstream academic opinion (not to mention the opinion of the community that’s most invested in getting these details right, i.e. effective altruists) regards GiveWell as highly reputable.
I didn’t get the sense from John’s comment that he understands reasonable social trust of this sort. He offered a false dichotomy between “thorough and methodical research” and “gut reactions”, and suggested that “trust comes from… [personally] evaluat[ing] the service through normal use and consumption.” I think this is deeply misleading. (Note, for example, that “normal use and consumption” does not give you any indication of how much lead is in your turmeric, whether your medication risks birth defects if taken during pregnancy, etc etc. Social trust, esp. in reputable institutions, is absolutely ubiquitous in navigating the world.)
I mean one huge reason is logistics and uncertainty.
First we must come to the knowledge that yes, children actually are dying, and this death can be prevented with $5000. How do we prove that? How does the average person obtain this information? Well, a charitable foundation says so. Or some famous celebrity claims it to be true. Or some study, which the vast majority of humanity has never read or even heard about, claims it to be true.
Then we need to trust the charitable foundation to faithfully execute the plan to save the child. How do we know the plan will be faithfully executed?
An effective altruist is committed to finding and evaluating these answers. The vast majority of humanity is not. So Effective Altruism has made a bunch of claims, but can’t prove these claims in a 5 minute elevator pitch.
In the end then you’re just another charity asking for a leap of faith. Some people jump, others don’t. If you’re not asking for a leap of faith, you’re asking for a huge mental investment to verify all the claims made.
I’m sorry, but those are just excuses. Nobody requires claims to be “proven” beyond all possible doubt before making decisions that are plausibly (but not definitely) better for themselves (like going to college). They only demand such proof to get out of making decisions that are plausibly better for others.
Unless you’re a conspiracy theorist, you should probably think it more likely than not that reputable independent evaluators like GiveWell are legit. And then a >50% chance of saving lives for something on the order of ~$5000 is plainly sufficient to justify so acting. (Assuming that saving a life with certainty for ~$10k would obviously be choice-worthy.)
If one is unusually skeptical of life-saving interventions, the benefits of direct cash transfers (e.g. GiveDirectly) are basically undeniable. No “huge mental investment” or “leap of faith” required. (Unless by “leap of faith” you mean perfectly ordinary sorts of trust that go without saying in every other realm of life.)
>Unless you’re a conspiracy theorist, you should probably think it more likely than not that reputable independent evaluators like GiveWell are legit.
On what basis? Through thorough and methodical research? Or gut reaction? The research has a significant cost to it. Guts are notoriously unreliable.
Clearly the answer is not to just “Trust Charities”, because Effective Altruism claims that they are more effective than other charities.
>(Unless by “leap of faith” you mean perfectly ordinary sorts of trust that go without saying in every other realm of life.)
In the normal capitalist economy, I go to a restaurant. I pay for the meal. The meal is immediately served to me. There is a clear connection of reciprocity. There is a clear indication that the requested service was provided. There is a clear avenue of evaluation. I just put the food in my mouth. That’s where the trust comes from. You buy, receive, and evaluate the service through normal use and consumption.
In charitable giving, there is no easy feedback. I give the money to a charity and the money essentially goes into a black void. I obtain no immediate feedback on whether the charity rendered is effective or not, because the services are not delivered to me but to somebody else. I cannot directly observe what the money is being used for.
You’re conflating “charity” and “charity evaluator”. The whole point of independent evaluators is that other people can defer to their research. So yes, I think the answer is just “trust evaluators” (not “trust first-order charities”), the same way that someone wondering which supplements contain unsafe levels of lead should trust Consumer Reports.
If you are going to a priori refuse to trust research done by independent evaluators until you’ve personally vetted them for yourself, then you have made yourself incapable of benefiting from their efforts. Maybe there are low-trust societies where that’s necessary. But you’re going to miss out on a lot if you actually live in a high-trust society and just refuse to believe it.
But I don’t think people blindly defer to evaluators in other life domains either—or at least they shouldn’t for major decisions. For instance, there are fraudulent university accreditation agencies, non-fraudulent ones with rather low standards, ones with standards that are pretty orthogonal to whether you’ll get a good education, and so on.
I suggest that people more commonly rely on a social web of trust—one strand might be: College X looks good in the US News rankings, and I trust the US News rankings because the school guidance counselor thought it reliable, and the guidance counselor’s reputation in the broader school community is good. In reality, there are probably a couple of strands coming out from US News (e.g., my friends were talking about it) and from School X (e.g., I read about some successful alumni). So there’s a broader web to justify the trust placed in the US News evaluation, buttressed by sources in which the decisionmaker already had some confidence. Of course, the guidance counselor could be incompetent, my friends probably are ill-informed, and most schools have at least a few successful alumni. But people don’t have the time or energy to validate everything!
My guess is that for many people, GiveWell doesn’t have the outgoing linkages that US News does in my example. And it has some anti-linkages—e.g., one might be inclined to defer to Stanford professors, and of course one had some harsh things (unjustified in my opinion) to say about GiveWell. It comes up in the AI overview when I google’d “criticisms of Givewell,” so fairly low-hanging fruit that would likely come up on modest due diligence.
I’d also note that independent cannot be assumed and must be either taken on trust (probably through a web of trust) or sufficiently proven (which requires a fair amount of drilling).
My guess is that GiveWell is simply not enmeshed in John’s web of trust the way it is in yours or mine. Making and sustaining a widely trusted brand is hard, so that’s not surprising.
I agree with your first couple of paragraphs. That’s why my initial reply referred to “reputable independent evaluators like GiveWell”.
Conspiracy theorists do, of course, have their own distinct (and degenerate) “webs of trust”, which is why I also flagged that possibility. But mainstream academic opinion (not to mention the opinion of the community that’s most invested in getting these details right, i.e. effective altruists) regards GiveWell as highly reputable.
I didn’t get the sense from John’s comment that he understands reasonable social trust of this sort. He offered a false dichotomy between “thorough and methodical research” and “gut reactions”, and suggested that “trust comes from… [personally] evaluat[ing] the service through normal use and consumption.” I think this is deeply misleading. (Note, for example, that “normal use and consumption” does not give you any indication of how much lead is in your turmeric, whether your medication risks birth defects if taken during pregnancy, etc etc. Social trust, esp. in reputable institutions, is absolutely ubiquitous in navigating the world.)