It seems likely that some EAs have fallen prey to the streetlight effect, but I don’t see anything of the sort in the general EA population, and rather a slight bias in the opposite direction, but that may be my own risk aversion. What might look like the streetlight effect is that unproven high risk–high return interventions are countless, and only very few of them will be cost-effective at all, and an even tinier portion will have superior cost-effectiveness, so that when it comes to donating as opposed to research, (1) EAs don’t know which of countless high risk–high return interventions to support and so “make do” with streetlight ones, and (2) the capital they do invest into their favorite high risk–high return interventions is spread thinly in the statistics because there is little consensus about them. But that only holds in regard to donating, not prioritization research or EA startup ideas.
I put “make do” in quotation marks because I actually put a lot of hope into the flow-through effects of deworming, bed nets, cash transfers, etc. for empowering the poor.
Thanks! I’ll add a note about the LW oversampling.
Update: There are a lot of people with a quantitative background in the movement (well, people like me), so they’ll probably have more fun studying interventions that are more cleanly quantifiable. But I think GiveWell, ACE, et al. do a good job of warning against exaggerated faith in individual cost-effectiveness estimates and probably don’t fall prey to it themselves.
It seems likely that some EAs have fallen prey to the streetlight effect, but I don’t see anything of the sort in the general EA population, and rather a slight bias in the opposite direction, but that may be my own risk aversion. What might look like the streetlight effect is that unproven high risk–high return interventions are countless, and only very few of them will be cost-effective at all, and an even tinier portion will have superior cost-effectiveness, so that when it comes to donating as opposed to research, (1) EAs don’t know which of countless high risk–high return interventions to support and so “make do” with streetlight ones, and (2) the capital they do invest into their favorite high risk–high return interventions is spread thinly in the statistics because there is little consensus about them. But that only holds in regard to donating, not prioritization research or EA startup ideas.
I put “make do” in quotation marks because I actually put a lot of hope into the flow-through effects of deworming, bed nets, cash transfers, etc. for empowering the poor.
Thanks! I’ll add a note about the LW oversampling.
Update: There are a lot of people with a quantitative background in the movement (well, people like me), so they’ll probably have more fun studying interventions that are more cleanly quantifiable. But I think GiveWell, ACE, et al. do a good job of warning against exaggerated faith in individual cost-effectiveness estimates and probably don’t fall prey to it themselves.