Thanks for giving everyone the opportunity to provide feedback!
I’m unsure how I feel about the section on global poverty and wellbeing. As of now, the section mostly just makes the same claim over and over that some charities are more effective than others, without much rigorous discussion around why that might be.
There’s a ton of great material under the final ‘differences in impact’ post that I would love to see as part of the main sequence. Right now, I’m worried that people new to global health and development will leave this section feeling waay overconfident about how sure we are about all of this charity stuff. If I was a person with experience working in the aid sector and decided to go through the curricula as it is, I think I would be left thinking that EAs are way overconfident despite barely knowing a thing about global poverty.
Here is an example of a potential exercise you could include that I think might go a long way to convey just how difficult it is to gain certainty about this stuff:
Read and evaluate two RCT’s on vaccine distribution in two southern Indian states. What might these RCT’s tell us about vaccine distribution in India? Have the reader try to assess which aspects of these RCT’s will generalise to the rest of India and which aspects won’t. They could for example make predictions (practicing another relevant EA skill!) on the results of an RCT for a northern Indian state.
You only have to do one deep dive on a topic to gain an appreciation for how little we know.
Thanks for giving everyone the opportunity to provide feedback!
I’m unsure how I feel about the section on global poverty and wellbeing. As of now, the section mostly just makes the same claim over and over that some charities are more effective than others, without much rigorous discussion around why that might be.
There’s a ton of great material under the final ‘differences in impact’ post that I would love to see as part of the main sequence. Right now, I’m worried that people new to global health and development will leave this section feeling waay overconfident about how sure we are about all of this charity stuff. If I was a person with experience working in the aid sector and decided to go through the curricula as it is, I think I would be left thinking that EAs are way overconfident despite barely knowing a thing about global poverty.
Here is an example of a potential exercise you could include that I think might go a long way to convey just how difficult it is to gain certainty about this stuff:
Read and evaluate two RCT’s on vaccine distribution in two southern Indian states. What might these RCT’s tell us about vaccine distribution in India? Have the reader try to assess which aspects of these RCT’s will generalise to the rest of India and which aspects won’t. They could for example make predictions (practicing another relevant EA skill!) on the results of an RCT for a northern Indian state.
You only have to do one deep dive on a topic to gain an appreciation for how little we know.