It seems to me that your basic argument is something like this
1) Working on highly political topics isn’t very effective
2) The charities recommended by 80K are highly political
3) Therefore, the charities recommended by 80K aren’t very effective.
Maybe I’ve missed it, but the only support I see for 1) is this allusion to Hanson:
There are standard arguments, for example this by Robin Hanson from 10 years ago about why it is not smart or “effective” to get into these political tugs-of-war if one wants to make a genuine difference in the world.
But, the evidence from that quote and from Hanson’s post, doesn’t provide enough support for the premise. I don’t think Hanson is saying that all cases of highly political topics are ineffective, and if he were, it seems clear that the general heuristic is nowhere near strong enough to support such a conclusion.
Instead, he’s saying that we ought to be skeptical of highly political causes. Fair enough. One way to resolve our initial skepticism would be to have a trusted expert in the field recommend a highly political intervention. This is exactly what we have here.
It could be that 80K shouldn’t recommend highly political charities even if they’re effective. If so, that seems like a PR/communication problem which could be fixed by distancing themselves from the recommendations. They seem to have already done this, but could do it further by making it as clear as possible that they’ve outsourced this recommendation to OpenPhil.
The fact that they let Cosecha (and to a lesser extent The Alliance for Safety and Justice) through reduces my confidence in 80,000 hours and the EA movement as a whole. Who thought it would be a good idea to get EA into the culture war with these causes, and also thought that they were plausibly among the most effective things you can do with money? Are they taking effectiveness seriously? What does the political diversity of meetings at 80,000 hours look like? Were there no conservative altruists present in discussions surrounding The Alliance for Safety and Justice and Cosecha, and the promotion of them as “beneficial for everyone” and “effective”?
This is needlessly hyperbolic. Criminal Justice Reform is one among many causes 80K mentions as options in their research. They outsourced this recommendation to an expert in the field. Maybe they did a poor job of outsourcing this, but inferring some widespread problems seems entirely unjustified.
Instead of writing this like some kind of expose, it seems you could get the same results by emailing the 80K team, noting the political sensitivity of the topic, and suggesting that they provide some additional disclaimers about the nature of the recommendation.
So basically, Chloe likes organizing, and she likes Carlos.
I would expect significantly more detailed analysis. Why does Chloe like organizing? What type of organizing does she like? What evidence is there it work? What has Cosecha done in the past? How much money did they spend? How strong is the evidence of policy impact? How strong is the evidence for the desirability of the policies? What are the negative effects? What are the relevant counterfactuals?
@Larks: The recommendation is not intended to be a full-fledged write-up of the organization’s effectiveness. It’s a quick note of support from an expert in the field. We could debate whether 80K should trust this kind of quick recommendation, but asking that Chloe explores the issue in significantly more details seems unfair given the context.
So basically, Chloe likes organizing, and she likes Carlos.
This is pretty unfair. She provides quite a few lines of evidence in favor of this particular organizer. Liking him is not the root cause of recommending him here.
Disclosure: I work for CEA which houses 80K. I also know nearly everyone on the 80K team.
Instead of writing this like some kind of expose, it seems you could get the same results by emailing the 80K team, noting the political sensitivity of the topic, and suggesting that they provide some additional disclaimers about the nature of the recommendation.
I don’t agree with the_jaded_one’s conclusions or think his post is particularly well-thought-out, but I don’t think raising the bar on criticism like this is very productive if you care about getting good criticism. (If you think the_jaded_one’s criticism is bad criticism, then I think it makes sense to just argue for that rather than saying that they should have made it privately.)
My reasons are very similar to Benjamin Hoffman’s reasons here.
I don’t agree with the_jaded_one’s conclusions or think his post is particularly well-thought-out, but I don’t think raising the bar on criticism like this is very productive if you care about getting good criticism. (If you think the_jaded_one’s criticism is bad criticism, then I think it makes sense to just argue for that rather than saying that they should have made it privately.)
I agree with this and wasn’t trying to say something to the contrary. What I was trying to do is note that the post makes a relatively minor issue into an expose on EA and on 80K. I think this is unnecessary and unwarranted by the issue. What is was trying to do is note one way of handling the issue if your goal is merely to gain more information or see that a problem gets fixed.
I think public criticism is fine. I think a good, but not required, practice is to show the criticism to the organization ahead of publishing it so that they can correct factual inaccuracies. I think that would have improved the criticism substantially in this case.
The original post is partly based on a misconception about how we produced the list and our motivations. That’s the kind of thing that could have been clarified if the author contacted us before publishing (or indeed, after publishing).
based on a misconception about how we produced the list and our motivations.
I would disagree; to me it seems irrelevant whether 80,000 hours is “just syndicating content”, or whether your organisation has a “direct view or goal”.
It’s on your website, as a recommendation. If it’s a bad recommendation, it’s your problem.
Perhaps, but the article is peculiar because it’s directed at 80,000 Hours rather than the ultimate source of the advice—when you just as easily could have addressed it to OpenPhil. It would be as though you had a problem with AMF and criticised 80,000 Hours over it (wondering what specifics could have caused us to recommend it), when you could just as easily direct it as GiveWell.
This leads you to speculation like “maybe [80,000 Hours] likes left-wing social justice causes”. Had you reached out you wouldn’t have had to speculate, and I could have told you right away that the list was designed to a follow a process that minimised the influence of my personal opinions. Had it been based on my personal views rather than a survey of experts and institutions, it probably wouldn’t have included the Criminal Justice Reform category.
Anyway, I do think if you’re writing a lengthy piece about a person or a group speaking with them to ask clarificatory questions is wise—it can save you from wasting time going down rabbit holes.
when you just as easily could have addressed it to OpenPhil
This is true—and I would say that a lot of the same questions could be directed to OpenPhil.
process that minimised the influence of my personal opinions
But there should be some ultimate sanity checking on that process; if some process ends up recommending something that isn’t really a good recommendation, then is it a good process?
it can save you from wasting time going down rabbit holes.
Yes, that’s true, and I would consider it a pro which I consider to be outweighed by other factors.
@Larks: The recommendation is not intended to be a full-fledged write-up of the organization’s effectiveness. It’s a quick note of support from an expert in the field. We could debate whether 80K should trust this kind of quick recommendation, but asking that Chloe explores the issue in significantly more details seems unfair given the context.
I think it’s potentially misleading to have chains of reference like this where from the outside it looks like “EA organizations recommend X” and when you get to the bottom of it there’s just one person giving nothing more than a professional opinion (which could be politically biased, as well).
I think it’s potentially misleading to have chains of reference like this where from the outside it looks like “EA organizations recommend X” and when you get to the bottom of it there’s just one person giving nothing more than a professional opinion (which could be politically biased, as well).
Agree with this. It should be clear wherever a recommendation is based on the OpenPhil post that the post is the nature of the recommendation. It should also be clear how seriously we ought to take the post.
One way to resolve our initial skepticism would be to have a trusted expert in the field
And in what field is Chloe Cockburn a “trusted expert”?
If we go by her twitter, we might say something like “she is an expert left-wing, highly political, anti-trump, pro-immigration activist”
Does that seem like a reasonable characterization of Chloe Cockburn’s expertise to you?
Characterizing her as “Trusted” seems pretty dishonest in this context. Imagine someone who has problems with EA and Cosecha, for example because they were worried about political bias in EA. Now imagine that they got to know her opinions and leanings, e.g. on her twitter. They wouldn’t “trust” her to make accurate calls about the effectiveness of donations to a left-wing, anti-Trump activist cause, because she is a left-wing anti-Trump activist. She is almost as biased as it is possible to be on this issue, the exact opposite of the kind of person whose opinion you should trust. Of course, she may have good arguments since those can come from biased people, but she is being touted as a “trusted expert”, not a biased expert with strong arguments, so that is what I am responding to.
I am uncertain why someone would choose to figure out what other people’s area of expertise is from Twitter. Most people’s Twitters contain their political opinions—as you point out—and do not contain their CV.
If you look at her LinkedIn, which seems to me to be a more appropriate source of information about her expertise, you’ll discover that in addition to being the current program officer at OpenPhil specializing in criminal justice (which is presumably why she was asked), she was also a former advocacy and policy counsel for the ACLU specializing in ending mass incarceration and a lawyer who specialized in holding police accountable for wrongful convictions. This seems to me like a person who does, in fact, have informed opinions about ending mass incarceration.
Informed opinions can still be biased, and we are being asked to “trust” her.
I am uncertain why someone would choose to figure out what other people’s area of expertise is from Twitter.
Well I am worried about political bias in EA. Her political opinions are supremely relevant.
On a strictly legal question such as “In situation X, does law Y apply” I would definitely trust her more than I would trust myself. But that is not the question that is being asked, the question that is being asked is “Will the action of funding Cosecha reduce incarceration while maintaining public safety” with the followup question of “Or is this about increasing illegal immigration by making it harder to deport illegals, opposing Trump and generally supporting left-wing causes?”
I don’t think that she can claim special knowledge or lack of bias in answering those questions. I think it’s hard for anyone to.
I am perhaps confused about what your claim is. Do you mean to say “Chloe Cockburn does not have expertise except in the facts of the law and being a left-wing anti-Trump activist”? Or “Chloe Cockburn has a good deal of expertise in fields relevant to the best possible way to reduce mass incarceration, but her opinion is sadly biased because she has liberal political opinions”?
Regarding her Twitter, I think Chloe Cockburn might have an informed opinion that reducing deportations of undocumented immigrants would reduce incarceration (through reducing the number of people in ICE detention) while maintaining public safety. That would cause her both to recommend Cosecha and to advocate on her Twitter feed for reducing deportations. Indeed, it is very common for people to do awareness-raising on Twitter for causes they believe are highly effective: if your argument were taken to its endpoint, we ought not trust GiveWell because its employees sometimes talk about how great malaria nets and deworming are on social media.
Probably, like all people, Chloe Cockburn supports the causes she supports for both rational and irrational reasons. That is something to take into account when deciding how seriously to take her advice. But that is also a fully general counterargument against ever taking advice from anyone.
reducing deportations of undocumented immigrants would reduce incarceration (through reducing the number of people in ICE detention)
That is true, but it is politicized inference. You could also reduce the number of people in ICE detention at any given time by deporting them much more quickly. Or you could reduce the number of undocumented immigrants by making it harder for them to get in in the first place, for example by building a large wall on the southern US border.
So I would characterize this as a politically biased opinion first and foremost. It’s not even an opinion that requires being informed—it’s obvious that you could reduce incarceration by releasing people from detention and just letting them have whatever they were trying to illegally take, you don’t need a law degree to make this inference, but you do need a political slant to claim that it’s a good idea.
And the totality of policies espoused by people such as Chloe Cockburn would be to flood the US with even more immigrants from poorer countries, not just to grant legal status to existing ones. This is entryism, and it is a highly political move that many people are deeply opposed to because they see it as part one of a plan to wipe them and their culture out. I don’t think that’s a good fit for an EA cause—even if you think it’s a good idea, it makes sense to separate it from EA.
Well, yes, anyone can come up with all sorts of policy ideas. If a person has policy expertise in a particular field, it allows them to sort out good policies from bad ones, because they are more aware of possible negative side effects and unintended consequences than an uninformed person is. I don’t think the fact that a person endorses a particular policy means that they haven’t thought about other policies.
Is your claim that Chloe Cockburn has failed to consider policy ideas associated with the right-wing, and thus has not done her due diligence to know that what she recommends is actually the best course? If so, what is your evidence for this claim?
What is policy expertise in the field of deciding that it is a good idea to encourage illegal immigration? I feel like we are (mis)using words here to make some extremely dodgy inferences. Chloe studied worked for the ACLU and a law firm, focusing on litigating police misconduct and aiming to reduce incarceration, and then Open Phil. This doesn’t IMO qualify her to decide that increasing legal and illegal immigration is a good idea, and doesn’t endow her with expertise on that question.
Is your claim that Chloe Cockburn has failed to consider policy ideas associated with the right-wing, and thus has not done her due diligence to know that what she recommends is actually the best course? If so, what is your evidence for this claim?
Well what is your evidence that she has done her due diligence to know that what she recommends is actually the best course?
if your argument were taken to its endpoint, we ought not trust GiveWell because its employees sometimes talk about how great malaria nets and deworming are on social media.
I don’t trust them, to the extent that I endorse these causes, I trust their arguments (having read them) and data, and I trust the implicit critical process that has failed to come up with reasons why deworming isn’t that good (to the extent that it hasn’t).
OpenPhil made an extensive write-up on their decision to hire Chloe here: http://blog.givewell.org/2015/09/03/the-process-of-hiring-our-first-cause-specific-program-officer/. Presumably after reading that you have enough information to decide whether to trust her recommendations (taking into account also whatever degree of trust you have in OpenPhil). If you decide you don’t trust it then that’s fine, but I don’t think that can function as an argument that the recommendation shouldn’t have been made in the first place (many people such as myself do trust it and got substantial value out of the recommendation and of reading what Chloe has to say in general).
I feel your overall engagement here hasn’t been very productive. You’re mostly repeating the same point, and to the extent you make other points it feels like you’re reaching for whatever counterarguments you can think of, without considering whether someone who disagreed with you would have an immediate response. The fact that you and Larks are responsible for 20 of the 32 comments on the thread is a further negative sign to me (you could probably condense the same or more information into fewer better-thought-out comments than you are currently making).
I don’t think that can function as an argument that the recommendation shouldn’t have been made in the first place
I agree, and I didn’t mention that document or my degree of trust in it.
I feel your overall engagement here hasn’t been very productive.
I suppose it depends what you want to produce. If debates were predictably productive I presume people would just update without even having to have a debate.
it feels like you’re reaching for whatever counterarguments you can think of, without considering whether someone who disagreed with you would have an immediate response
What counterarguments is one supposed to make, other than the ones one thinks of? I suppose the alternative is to not make a counterargument, or start a debate with all possible lines of play fully worked out and prepared? A high standard, to be sure. Sometimes one doesn’t correctly anticipate the actual responses. Is there some tax on number of comments or responses? I mean this is valid to an extent, if someone is making really dumb arguments, but then again sometimes one has to ask the emperor why he isn’t wearing any clothes.
Support for a cause area isn’t bias. That’s just having an opinion. Your argument would imply that ACE is biased because they are run by animal activists, or that Givewell is biased because they advocate for reducing global poverty. These groups aren’t necessarily an authority when you’re deciding between cause areas, of course. But in deciding which organization is most effective within a given cause area, the “trusted experts” are almost always going to be advocates for that cause area.
More generally, you keep trying to frame your points as politically neutral “meta” considerations but it definitely feels like you have an axe to grind against the activist left which motivates a lot of what you’re saying.
More generally, you keep trying to frame your points as politically neutral “meta” considerations but it definitely feels like you have an axe to grind against the activist left which motivates a lot of what you’re saying.
Well if EA is funding the activist left, justifying it by saying that a “trusted expert” (who just happens to be a leftist activist!) said it was a good idea, what exactly do you expect me to do?
And if people who disagree with leftist activism aren’t allowed to bring up “meta” considerations when those considerations are inconvenient for leftist activism, then who is going to do it?
I’m all for criticising organizations without having your post vetted by them. But at some point, it is useful to reach out to them to let them know your criticism, if you want it to to be useful, and it seems like you’ve now well-passed this point.
I agree that people should be allowed to give criticism without talking to the critiqued organizations first. It does usually improve informativeness and persuasiveness, but if we required every critique to be of extremely high journalistic quality then we would never get any criticism done, so we have a lower standard.
By this point, though, the thread has created enough discussion that at least some of OpenPhil are probably reading it. Still you’re effectively talking about them as though they’re not in the room, even though they are. The fix is to email them a link, and to try to give arguments that you think they would appreciate as input for how they could improve their activities.
The fix is to email them a link, and to try to give arguments that you think they would appreciate as input for how they could improve their activities.
Those arguments are in the post.
I am writing under a pseudonym so I don’t have an easy way of emailing them without it going to their spam folder. I have sent an email pointing them to the post, though.
it seems you could get the same results by emailing the 80K team
Given that the response given by 80,000 Hours here is
[we] don’t really have independent views or goals on any of these things. We’re just syndicating content
I am extremely glad that I didn’t email them and try to keep this private. I believe that 80,000 Hours should take responsibility for recommendations that appear on its site, with the unavoidable implicit seal of approval that that confers.
It could be that 80K shouldn’t recommend highly political charities even if they’re effective. If so, that seems like a PR/communication problem which could be fixed by distancing themselves from the recommendations. They seem to have already done this, but could do it further by making it as clear as possible that they’ve outsourced this recommendation to OpenPhil.
They could also not include them in a document titled “The effective altruism guide to donating this giving season”, a title which implies a high level of endorsement from the movement.
They could also not include them in a document titled “The effective altruism guide to donating this giving season”, a title which implies a high level of endorsement from the movement.
Did you read the intro to that post? They do the exact thing I recommend in the quote you provided.
People in the effective altruism community aim to use evidence and careful reasoning to work out how to best promote the wellbeing of all. To find the highest-impact charities this giving season, they’ve done tens of thousands of hours of research and published over 50,000 words of analysis this month. We read it all, and summed up the main recommendations by area below (not in priority order):
It is the EA guide because they synthesize the recommendations of people in EA. They say this from the outset, which is precisely what I think they should do.
One way to resolve our initial skepticism would be to have a trusted expert in the field recommend a highly political intervention.
This is a very low standard. It is easy to find any number of experts for many interventions. In order to have a reasonable chance of identifying the most cost-effective interventions, we need to demand higher standards than this. While we might disagree on what these standards might be, some possibilities might include:
We could debate whether 80K should trust this kind of quick recommendation, but asking that Chloe explores the issue in significantly more details seems unfair given the context.
That is precisely what I am asking! This post is addressed at 80k, not Chloe. It’s entirely reasonable for random experts to give brief opinions. It is not at all reasonable for 80k to present the brief views of one expert as the views of the movement.
If these groups had a long history of support among EAs, including a substantial amount of publicly available cost-effectiveness analysis, things would be different. Then we could point to Chloe’s paragraph as an example of the reasons people support them. But as it is the paragraph seems to provide the entirety of the evidence 80k has, and in this light it is entirely insufficient.
It is not at all reasonable for 80k to present the brief views of one expert as the views of the movement.
I think we agree: 80K should make the nature of the recommendations more clear. I believe they’ve already made an edit to the post that accomplishes this goal.
suggesting that they provide some additional disclaimers about the nature of the recommendation.
I most certainly wouldn’t suggest that, I would suggest that they cease recommending both of these organisations, with the caveat that Cosecha is the worse of the two and first in line for being dropped.
I most certainly wouldn’t suggest that, I would suggest that they cease recommending both of these organizations, with the caveat that Cosecha is the worse of the two and first in line for being dropped.
As far as I can tell, nothing in your post or subsequent comments warrant that conclusion. If the issue is making sensitive recommendations seem like the opinion of EA, then better caveating can solve that issue. If the issue is that the charities are in fact ineffective, then you haven’t provided any direct evidence of this, only the indirect point that political charities are often ineffective.
I’d find it hard to believe that there is something problematic in transmitting a recommendation along with your epistemic status with regards to the recommendation in a post. It seems like 80K could do a better job of transmitting the epistemic status of the recommendation, but that’s not an argument against recommendation the charities to begin with.
If the issue is that the charities are in fact ineffective, then you haven’t provided any direct evidence of this, only the indirect point that political charities are often ineffective.
Where is the direct evidence that Cosecha is highly effective?
It seems to me that your basic argument is something like this
1) Working on highly political topics isn’t very effective 2) The charities recommended by 80K are highly political 3) Therefore, the charities recommended by 80K aren’t very effective.
Maybe I’ve missed it, but the only support I see for 1) is this allusion to Hanson:
But, the evidence from that quote and from Hanson’s post, doesn’t provide enough support for the premise. I don’t think Hanson is saying that all cases of highly political topics are ineffective, and if he were, it seems clear that the general heuristic is nowhere near strong enough to support such a conclusion.
Instead, he’s saying that we ought to be skeptical of highly political causes. Fair enough. One way to resolve our initial skepticism would be to have a trusted expert in the field recommend a highly political intervention. This is exactly what we have here.
It could be that 80K shouldn’t recommend highly political charities even if they’re effective. If so, that seems like a PR/communication problem which could be fixed by distancing themselves from the recommendations. They seem to have already done this, but could do it further by making it as clear as possible that they’ve outsourced this recommendation to OpenPhil.
This is needlessly hyperbolic. Criminal Justice Reform is one among many causes 80K mentions as options in their research. They outsourced this recommendation to an expert in the field. Maybe they did a poor job of outsourcing this, but inferring some widespread problems seems entirely unjustified.
Instead of writing this like some kind of expose, it seems you could get the same results by emailing the 80K team, noting the political sensitivity of the topic, and suggesting that they provide some additional disclaimers about the nature of the recommendation.
I would expect significantly more detailed analysis. Why does Chloe like organizing? What type of organizing does she like? What evidence is there it work? What has Cosecha done in the past? How much money did they spend? How strong is the evidence of policy impact? How strong is the evidence for the desirability of the policies? What are the negative effects? What are the relevant counterfactuals?
@Larks: The recommendation is not intended to be a full-fledged write-up of the organization’s effectiveness. It’s a quick note of support from an expert in the field. We could debate whether 80K should trust this kind of quick recommendation, but asking that Chloe explores the issue in significantly more details seems unfair given the context.
This is pretty unfair. She provides quite a few lines of evidence in favor of this particular organizer. Liking him is not the root cause of recommending him here.
Disclosure: I work for CEA which houses 80K. I also know nearly everyone on the 80K team.
I don’t agree with the_jaded_one’s conclusions or think his post is particularly well-thought-out, but I don’t think raising the bar on criticism like this is very productive if you care about getting good criticism. (If you think the_jaded_one’s criticism is bad criticism, then I think it makes sense to just argue for that rather than saying that they should have made it privately.)
My reasons are very similar to Benjamin Hoffman’s reasons here.
I agree with this and wasn’t trying to say something to the contrary. What I was trying to do is note that the post makes a relatively minor issue into an expose on EA and on 80K. I think this is unnecessary and unwarranted by the issue. What is was trying to do is note one way of handling the issue if your goal is merely to gain more information or see that a problem gets fixed.
I think public criticism is fine. I think a good, but not required, practice is to show the criticism to the organization ahead of publishing it so that they can correct factual inaccuracies. I think that would have improved the criticism substantially in this case.
Thanks for clarifying; your position seems reasonable to me.
The original post is partly based on a misconception about how we produced the list and our motivations. That’s the kind of thing that could have been clarified if the author contacted us before publishing (or indeed, after publishing).
I would disagree; to me it seems irrelevant whether 80,000 hours is “just syndicating content”, or whether your organisation has a “direct view or goal”.
It’s on your website, as a recommendation. If it’s a bad recommendation, it’s your problem.
Perhaps, but the article is peculiar because it’s directed at 80,000 Hours rather than the ultimate source of the advice—when you just as easily could have addressed it to OpenPhil. It would be as though you had a problem with AMF and criticised 80,000 Hours over it (wondering what specifics could have caused us to recommend it), when you could just as easily direct it as GiveWell.
This leads you to speculation like “maybe [80,000 Hours] likes left-wing social justice causes”. Had you reached out you wouldn’t have had to speculate, and I could have told you right away that the list was designed to a follow a process that minimised the influence of my personal opinions. Had it been based on my personal views rather than a survey of experts and institutions, it probably wouldn’t have included the Criminal Justice Reform category.
Anyway, I do think if you’re writing a lengthy piece about a person or a group speaking with them to ask clarificatory questions is wise—it can save you from wasting time going down rabbit holes.
This is true—and I would say that a lot of the same questions could be directed to OpenPhil.
But there should be some ultimate sanity checking on that process; if some process ends up recommending something that isn’t really a good recommendation, then is it a good process?
Yes, that’s true, and I would consider it a pro which I consider to be outweighed by other factors.
I think it’s potentially misleading to have chains of reference like this where from the outside it looks like “EA organizations recommend X” and when you get to the bottom of it there’s just one person giving nothing more than a professional opinion (which could be politically biased, as well).
Yeah. We should hold ourselves to higher epistemic standards than “we were able to find a single expert who believed this”.
Agree with this. It should be clear wherever a recommendation is based on the OpenPhil post that the post is the nature of the recommendation. It should also be clear how seriously we ought to take the post.
And in what field is Chloe Cockburn a “trusted expert”?
If we go by her twitter, we might say something like “she is an expert left-wing, highly political, anti-trump, pro-immigration activist”
Does that seem like a reasonable characterization of Chloe Cockburn’s expertise to you?
Characterizing her as “Trusted” seems pretty dishonest in this context. Imagine someone who has problems with EA and Cosecha, for example because they were worried about political bias in EA. Now imagine that they got to know her opinions and leanings, e.g. on her twitter. They wouldn’t “trust” her to make accurate calls about the effectiveness of donations to a left-wing, anti-Trump activist cause, because she is a left-wing anti-Trump activist. She is almost as biased as it is possible to be on this issue, the exact opposite of the kind of person whose opinion you should trust. Of course, she may have good arguments since those can come from biased people, but she is being touted as a “trusted expert”, not a biased expert with strong arguments, so that is what I am responding to.
I am uncertain why someone would choose to figure out what other people’s area of expertise is from Twitter. Most people’s Twitters contain their political opinions—as you point out—and do not contain their CV.
If you look at her LinkedIn, which seems to me to be a more appropriate source of information about her expertise, you’ll discover that in addition to being the current program officer at OpenPhil specializing in criminal justice (which is presumably why she was asked), she was also a former advocacy and policy counsel for the ACLU specializing in ending mass incarceration and a lawyer who specialized in holding police accountable for wrongful convictions. This seems to me like a person who does, in fact, have informed opinions about ending mass incarceration.
Informed opinions can still be biased, and we are being asked to “trust” her.
Well I am worried about political bias in EA. Her political opinions are supremely relevant.
On a strictly legal question such as “In situation X, does law Y apply” I would definitely trust her more than I would trust myself. But that is not the question that is being asked, the question that is being asked is “Will the action of funding Cosecha reduce incarceration while maintaining public safety” with the followup question of “Or is this about increasing illegal immigration by making it harder to deport illegals, opposing Trump and generally supporting left-wing causes?”
I don’t think that she can claim special knowledge or lack of bias in answering those questions. I think it’s hard for anyone to.
I am perhaps confused about what your claim is. Do you mean to say “Chloe Cockburn does not have expertise except in the facts of the law and being a left-wing anti-Trump activist”? Or “Chloe Cockburn has a good deal of expertise in fields relevant to the best possible way to reduce mass incarceration, but her opinion is sadly biased because she has liberal political opinions”?
Regarding her Twitter, I think Chloe Cockburn might have an informed opinion that reducing deportations of undocumented immigrants would reduce incarceration (through reducing the number of people in ICE detention) while maintaining public safety. That would cause her both to recommend Cosecha and to advocate on her Twitter feed for reducing deportations. Indeed, it is very common for people to do awareness-raising on Twitter for causes they believe are highly effective: if your argument were taken to its endpoint, we ought not trust GiveWell because its employees sometimes talk about how great malaria nets and deworming are on social media.
Probably, like all people, Chloe Cockburn supports the causes she supports for both rational and irrational reasons. That is something to take into account when deciding how seriously to take her advice. But that is also a fully general counterargument against ever taking advice from anyone.
That is true, but it is politicized inference. You could also reduce the number of people in ICE detention at any given time by deporting them much more quickly. Or you could reduce the number of undocumented immigrants by making it harder for them to get in in the first place, for example by building a large wall on the southern US border.
So I would characterize this as a politically biased opinion first and foremost. It’s not even an opinion that requires being informed—it’s obvious that you could reduce incarceration by releasing people from detention and just letting them have whatever they were trying to illegally take, you don’t need a law degree to make this inference, but you do need a political slant to claim that it’s a good idea.
And the totality of policies espoused by people such as Chloe Cockburn would be to flood the US with even more immigrants from poorer countries, not just to grant legal status to existing ones. This is entryism, and it is a highly political move that many people are deeply opposed to because they see it as part one of a plan to wipe them and their culture out. I don’t think that’s a good fit for an EA cause—even if you think it’s a good idea, it makes sense to separate it from EA.
Well, yes, anyone can come up with all sorts of policy ideas. If a person has policy expertise in a particular field, it allows them to sort out good policies from bad ones, because they are more aware of possible negative side effects and unintended consequences than an uninformed person is. I don’t think the fact that a person endorses a particular policy means that they haven’t thought about other policies.
Is your claim that Chloe Cockburn has failed to consider policy ideas associated with the right-wing, and thus has not done her due diligence to know that what she recommends is actually the best course? If so, what is your evidence for this claim?
What is policy expertise in the field of deciding that it is a good idea to encourage illegal immigration? I feel like we are (mis)using words here to make some extremely dodgy inferences. Chloe studied worked for the ACLU and a law firm, focusing on litigating police misconduct and aiming to reduce incarceration, and then Open Phil. This doesn’t IMO qualify her to decide that increasing legal and illegal immigration is a good idea, and doesn’t endow her with expertise on that question.
Well what is your evidence that she has done her due diligence to know that what she recommends is actually the best course?
I don’t trust them, to the extent that I endorse these causes, I trust their arguments (having read them) and data, and I trust the implicit critical process that has failed to come up with reasons why deworming isn’t that good (to the extent that it hasn’t).
OpenPhil made an extensive write-up on their decision to hire Chloe here: http://blog.givewell.org/2015/09/03/the-process-of-hiring-our-first-cause-specific-program-officer/. Presumably after reading that you have enough information to decide whether to trust her recommendations (taking into account also whatever degree of trust you have in OpenPhil). If you decide you don’t trust it then that’s fine, but I don’t think that can function as an argument that the recommendation shouldn’t have been made in the first place (many people such as myself do trust it and got substantial value out of the recommendation and of reading what Chloe has to say in general).
I feel your overall engagement here hasn’t been very productive. You’re mostly repeating the same point, and to the extent you make other points it feels like you’re reaching for whatever counterarguments you can think of, without considering whether someone who disagreed with you would have an immediate response. The fact that you and Larks are responsible for 20 of the 32 comments on the thread is a further negative sign to me (you could probably condense the same or more information into fewer better-thought-out comments than you are currently making).
I agree, and I didn’t mention that document or my degree of trust in it.
I suppose it depends what you want to produce. If debates were predictably productive I presume people would just update without even having to have a debate.
What counterarguments is one supposed to make, other than the ones one thinks of? I suppose the alternative is to not make a counterargument, or start a debate with all possible lines of play fully worked out and prepared? A high standard, to be sure. Sometimes one doesn’t correctly anticipate the actual responses. Is there some tax on number of comments or responses? I mean this is valid to an extent, if someone is making really dumb arguments, but then again sometimes one has to ask the emperor why he isn’t wearing any clothes.
Support for a cause area isn’t bias. That’s just having an opinion. Your argument would imply that ACE is biased because they are run by animal activists, or that Givewell is biased because they advocate for reducing global poverty. These groups aren’t necessarily an authority when you’re deciding between cause areas, of course. But in deciding which organization is most effective within a given cause area, the “trusted experts” are almost always going to be advocates for that cause area.
More generally, you keep trying to frame your points as politically neutral “meta” considerations but it definitely feels like you have an axe to grind against the activist left which motivates a lot of what you’re saying.
Well if EA is funding the activist left, justifying it by saying that a “trusted expert” (who just happens to be a leftist activist!) said it was a good idea, what exactly do you expect me to do?
And if people who disagree with leftist activism aren’t allowed to bring up “meta” considerations when those considerations are inconvenient for leftist activism, then who is going to do it?
I’m all for criticising organizations without having your post vetted by them. But at some point, it is useful to reach out to them to let them know your criticism, if you want it to to be useful, and it seems like you’ve now well-passed this point.
Can you elaborate?
I agree that people should be allowed to give criticism without talking to the critiqued organizations first. It does usually improve informativeness and persuasiveness, but if we required every critique to be of extremely high journalistic quality then we would never get any criticism done, so we have a lower standard.
By this point, though, the thread has created enough discussion that at least some of OpenPhil are probably reading it. Still you’re effectively talking about them as though they’re not in the room, even though they are. The fix is to email them a link, and to try to give arguments that you think they would appreciate as input for how they could improve their activities.
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Those arguments are in the post.
I am writing under a pseudonym so I don’t have an easy way of emailing them without it going to their spam folder. I have sent an email pointing them to the post, though.
Given that the response given by 80,000 Hours here is
I am extremely glad that I didn’t email them and try to keep this private. I believe that 80,000 Hours should take responsibility for recommendations that appear on its site, with the unavoidable implicit seal of approval that that confers.
They could also not include them in a document titled “The effective altruism guide to donating this giving season”, a title which implies a high level of endorsement from the movement.
Did you read the intro to that post? They do the exact thing I recommend in the quote you provided.
It is the EA guide because they synthesize the recommendations of people in EA. They say this from the outset, which is precisely what I think they should do.
This is a very low standard. It is easy to find any number of experts for many interventions. In order to have a reasonable chance of identifying the most cost-effective interventions, we need to demand higher standards than this. While we might disagree on what these standards might be, some possibilities might include:
Having done cost-benefit analysis
Providing references to RCTs
Providing a theoretical framework
Fairly considering opposing views
Yet none of these are present here.
That is precisely what I am asking! This post is addressed at 80k, not Chloe. It’s entirely reasonable for random experts to give brief opinions. It is not at all reasonable for 80k to present the brief views of one expert as the views of the movement.
If these groups had a long history of support among EAs, including a substantial amount of publicly available cost-effectiveness analysis, things would be different. Then we could point to Chloe’s paragraph as an example of the reasons people support them. But as it is the paragraph seems to provide the entirety of the evidence 80k has, and in this light it is entirely insufficient.
I think we agree: 80K should make the nature of the recommendations more clear. I believe they’ve already made an edit to the post that accomplishes this goal.
Presumably you now withdraw your objection?
I most certainly wouldn’t suggest that, I would suggest that they cease recommending both of these organisations, with the caveat that Cosecha is the worse of the two and first in line for being dropped.
As far as I can tell, nothing in your post or subsequent comments warrant that conclusion. If the issue is making sensitive recommendations seem like the opinion of EA, then better caveating can solve that issue. If the issue is that the charities are in fact ineffective, then you haven’t provided any direct evidence of this, only the indirect point that political charities are often ineffective.
I’d find it hard to believe that there is something problematic in transmitting a recommendation along with your epistemic status with regards to the recommendation in a post. It seems like 80K could do a better job of transmitting the epistemic status of the recommendation, but that’s not an argument against recommendation the charities to begin with.
Where is the direct evidence that Cosecha is highly effective?