Youâre conflating âcharityâ and âcharity evaluatorâ. The whole point of independent evaluators is that other people can defer to their research. So yes, I think the answer is just âtrust evaluatorsâ (not âtrust first-order charitiesâ), 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 youâve personally vetted them for yourself, then you have made yourself incapable of benefiting from their efforts. Maybe there are low-trust societies where thatâs necessary. But youâre going to miss out on a lot if you actually live in a high-trust society and just refuse to believe it.
But I donât think people blindly defer to evaluators in other life domains eitherâor at least they shouldnât 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 youâll get a good education, and so on.
I suggest that people more commonly rely on a social web of trustâone 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 counselorâs 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 thereâs 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 donât have the time or energy to validate everything!
My guess is that for many people, GiveWell doesnât have the outgoing linkages that US News does in my example. And it has some anti-linkagesâe.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 googleâd âcriticisms of Givewell,â so fairly low-hanging fruit that would likely come up on modest due diligence.
Iâd 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 Johnâs web of trust the way it is in yours or mine. Making and sustaining a widely trusted brand is hard, so thatâs not surprising.
I agree with your first couple of paragraphs. Thatâs why my initial reply referred to âreputable independent evaluators like GiveWellâ.
Conspiracy theorists do, of course, have their own distinct (and degenerate) âwebs of trustâ, which is why I also flagged that possibility. But mainstream academic opinion (not to mention the opinion of the community thatâs most invested in getting these details right, i.e. effective altruists) regards GiveWell as highly reputable.
I didnât get the sense from Johnâs comment that he understands reasonable social trust of this sort. He offered a false dichotomy between âthorough and methodical researchâ and âgut reactionsâ, and suggested that âtrust comes from⌠[personally] evaluat[ing] the service through normal use and consumption.â I think this is deeply misleading. (Note, for example, that ânormal use and consumptionâ 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.)
Youâre conflating âcharityâ and âcharity evaluatorâ. The whole point of independent evaluators is that other people can defer to their research. So yes, I think the answer is just âtrust evaluatorsâ (not âtrust first-order charitiesâ), 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 youâve personally vetted them for yourself, then you have made yourself incapable of benefiting from their efforts. Maybe there are low-trust societies where thatâs necessary. But youâre going to miss out on a lot if you actually live in a high-trust society and just refuse to believe it.
But I donât think people blindly defer to evaluators in other life domains eitherâor at least they shouldnât 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 youâll get a good education, and so on.
I suggest that people more commonly rely on a social web of trustâone 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 counselorâs 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 thereâs 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 donât have the time or energy to validate everything!
My guess is that for many people, GiveWell doesnât have the outgoing linkages that US News does in my example. And it has some anti-linkagesâe.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 googleâd âcriticisms of Givewell,â so fairly low-hanging fruit that would likely come up on modest due diligence.
Iâd 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 Johnâs web of trust the way it is in yours or mine. Making and sustaining a widely trusted brand is hard, so thatâs not surprising.
I agree with your first couple of paragraphs. Thatâs why my initial reply referred to âreputable independent evaluators like GiveWellâ.
Conspiracy theorists do, of course, have their own distinct (and degenerate) âwebs of trustâ, which is why I also flagged that possibility. But mainstream academic opinion (not to mention the opinion of the community thatâs most invested in getting these details right, i.e. effective altruists) regards GiveWell as highly reputable.
I didnât get the sense from Johnâs comment that he understands reasonable social trust of this sort. He offered a false dichotomy between âthorough and methodical researchâ and âgut reactionsâ, and suggested that âtrust comes from⌠[personally] evaluat[ing] the service through normal use and consumption.â I think this is deeply misleading. (Note, for example, that ânormal use and consumptionâ 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.)