Adding a +1 to Nathan’s reaction here, this seems to have been some of the harshest discussion on the EA Forum I’ve seen for a while (especially on an object-level case).
Of course, making sure charitable funds are doing the good that the claim is something that deserves attention, research, and sometimes a critical eye. From my perspective of wanting more pluralism in EA, it seems[1] to me that HLI is a worthwhile endeavour to follow (even if its programme ends with it being ~the same or worse than cash transfers). Of all the charitable spending in the world, is HLI’s really worth this much anger?
It just feels like there’s inside baseball that I’m missing here.
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.
Adding a +1 to Nathan’s reaction here, this seems to have been some of the harshest discussion on the EA Forum I’ve seen for a while (especially on an object-level case).
Of course, making sure charitable funds are doing the good that the claim is something that deserves attention, research, and sometimes a critical eye. From my perspective of wanting more pluralism in EA, it seems[1] to me that HLI is a worthwhile endeavour to follow (even if its programme ends with it being ~the same or worse than cash transfers). Of all the charitable spending in the world, is HLI’s really worth this much anger?
It just feels like there’s inside baseball that I’m missing here.
weakly of course, I claim no expertise or special ability in charity evaluation
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.