MichaelA🔸 comments on A Funnel for Cause Candidates

[MichaelA🔸]

A (nit-picky) point that feels somewhat related to your points:

I like that Nuño says “To clarify, I’m not saying that all EA charities need to be started after a quantitative cost-effectiveness analysis.”

But personally, I still feel like the following phrasing implies an emphasis on empirical data and/​or a quantitative cost-effectiveness analysis:

Evaluation: How does the evidence base for this kind of intervention look? What does a cost-effectiveness analysis of proposed interventions reveal?

I think often it might make sense to also or instead emphasise things like theoretical arguments, judgemental forecasts, and expert opinions. (See also Charity Entrepreneurship’s research method.) I think these things are technically evidence in a Bayesian sense, but aren’t what people would usually think of when you say “evidence base”.

So personally, I think I’d be inclined to rephrase the “Evaluation” step to something like “How does the evidence base and/​or reasoning for this kind of intervention look? This could include looking at empirical data, making cost-effectiveness analyses, collecting forecasts or expert opinions, or further probing and fleshing out the theoretical arguments.”