This is speculative, and I don’t want this to be read as an endorsement of people’s critical comments; rather, it’s a hypothesis about what’s driving the “harsh discussion”:
It seems like one theme in people’s critical comments is misrepresentation. Specifically, multiple people have accused HLI of making claims that are more confident and/or more positive than are warranted (see, e.g., some of the commentsbelow, which say things like: “I don’t think this is an accurate representation,” “it was about whether I thought that sentence and set of links gave an accurate impression,” and “HLI’s institutional agenda corrupts its ability to conduct fair-minded and even-handed assessments”).
I wonder if people are particularly sensitive to this, because EA partly grew out of a desire to make charitable giving more objective and unbiased, and so the perception that HLI is misrepresenting information feels antithetical to EA in a very fundamental way.
This is speculative, and I don’t want this to be read as an endorsement of people’s critical comments; rather, it’s a hypothesis about what’s driving the “harsh discussion”:
It seems like one theme in people’s critical comments is misrepresentation. Specifically, multiple people have accused HLI of making claims that are more confident and/or more positive than are warranted (see, e.g., some of the comments below, which say things like: “I don’t think this is an accurate representation,” “it was about whether I thought that sentence and set of links gave an accurate impression,” and “HLI’s institutional agenda corrupts its ability to conduct fair-minded and even-handed assessments”).
I wonder if people are particularly sensitive to this, because EA partly grew out of a desire to make charitable giving more objective and unbiased, and so the perception that HLI is misrepresenting information feels antithetical to EA in a very fundamental way.