I don’t see the merit of upbraiding 80k for aggregation various sources of ‘EA philanthropic advice’ because one element of this relies on political views one may disagree with. Not including Cockburn’s recommendations whilst including all the other OpenPhil staffers also implies political views others would find disagreeable. It’s also fairly clear from the introduction the post (at least for non-animal charities) was canvassing all relevant recommendations rather than editorializing.
That said, it is perhaps unwise to translate ‘advice from OpenPhil staffers’ into ‘EA recommendations’. OpenPhil is clear about how it licenses itself to try and ‘pick hits’ which may involve presuming or taking a bet on a particular hot button political topic (i.e. Immigration, criminal justice, abortion), being willing to take a particular empirical bet in the face of divided expertise, and so forth. For these reasons OpenPhil are not a ‘Givewell for everything else’, and their staffer’s recommendations, although valuable for them to share and 80k to publicise, should carry the health warning that they are often conditional on quite large and non-resilient conjunctions of complicated convictions—which may not represent ‘expert consensus’ on these issues.
Note that we say when describing this source at the beginning of the post that:
“[We refer to] Open Philanthropy Project’s suggestions for individual donors. … Though note that “These are reasonably strong options in causes of interest, and shouldn’t be taken as outright recommendations.””
We then consistently throughout the post refer to these as ‘suggestions’ only, rather than ‘recommendations’, as for the other sources.
I don’t see the merit of upbraiding 80k for aggregation various sources of ‘EA philanthropic advice’ because one element of this relies on political views one may disagree with. Not including Cockburn’s recommendations whilst including all the other OpenPhil staffers also implies political views others would find disagreeable. It’s also fairly clear from the introduction the post (at least for non-animal charities) was canvassing all relevant recommendations rather than editorializing.
That said, it is perhaps unwise to translate ‘advice from OpenPhil staffers’ into ‘EA recommendations’. OpenPhil is clear about how it licenses itself to try and ‘pick hits’ which may involve presuming or taking a bet on a particular hot button political topic (i.e. Immigration, criminal justice, abortion), being willing to take a particular empirical bet in the face of divided expertise, and so forth. For these reasons OpenPhil are not a ‘Givewell for everything else’, and their staffer’s recommendations, although valuable for them to share and 80k to publicise, should carry the health warning that they are often conditional on quite large and non-resilient conjunctions of complicated convictions—which may not represent ‘expert consensus’ on these issues.
Note that we say when describing this source at the beginning of the post that:
We then consistently throughout the post refer to these as ‘suggestions’ only, rather than ‘recommendations’, as for the other sources.