Thanks for responding (and for encouraging me, I think, to write this in the first place).
Only change your life by an amount proportionate with your trust in the change you plan to make.
Sure. The point I am trying to make is that I would pay to have some of that work done for me. If enough people would then you could pay someone to do it. I don’t think we disagree with the thinking that needs to be done, but I think I am less inclined/less trusting that I will do it well and would prefer and infrastructural solution.
I also agree that some infrastructure would be good. In the meantime, I suggest reading criticisms of EA from both non-EAs and from EAs, and how EAs respond to the criticism (or how one could successfully respond to it). That’s probably the closest you can get to external audits and checking for flaws in EA.
Unfortunately there’s no central repository of EA criticism that I know of (this seems quite valuable to me!). Carl Shulman said on Facebook recently on a post by Julia Galef that he keeps a personal bookmarks folder of criticisms of groups that he has some affiliation with or interest in. If you’re interested, you could try contacting him to see if it’s shareable.
You can also check the mistakes pages of EA orgs, like GiveWell and 80000 Hours (and their evaluations page). That’s only a partial solution since there could be many mistakes by EA orgs that they themselves don’t recognize, but it’s one step forward of many.
Yes, I agree that infrastructure would be better than no infrastructure. I’m not sure who I’d trust to do this job well among people who aren’t already working on something impactful, but perhaps there are people in EA inclined towards a watchdog/auditor mentality who would be interested, assuming that the orgs being “audited” could work out an arrangement that everyone felt good about.
Thanks for responding (and for encouraging me, I think, to write this in the first place).
Sure. The point I am trying to make is that I would pay to have some of that work done for me. If enough people would then you could pay someone to do it. I don’t think we disagree with the thinking that needs to be done, but I think I am less inclined/less trusting that I will do it well and would prefer and infrastructural solution.
I also agree that some infrastructure would be good. In the meantime, I suggest reading criticisms of EA from both non-EAs and from EAs, and how EAs respond to the criticism (or how one could successfully respond to it). That’s probably the closest you can get to external audits and checking for flaws in EA.
Unfortunately there’s no central repository of EA criticism that I know of (this seems quite valuable to me!). Carl Shulman said on Facebook recently on a post by Julia Galef that he keeps a personal bookmarks folder of criticisms of groups that he has some affiliation with or interest in. If you’re interested, you could try contacting him to see if it’s shareable.
You can also check the mistakes pages of EA orgs, like GiveWell and 80000 Hours (and their evaluations page). That’s only a partial solution since there could be many mistakes by EA orgs that they themselves don’t recognize, but it’s one step forward of many.
Yes, I agree that infrastructure would be better than no infrastructure. I’m not sure who I’d trust to do this job well among people who aren’t already working on something impactful, but perhaps there are people in EA inclined towards a watchdog/auditor mentality who would be interested, assuming that the orgs being “audited” could work out an arrangement that everyone felt good about.