Applicants to ACX grants were almost by definition not working on problems with well-established solutions (in EA or otherwise), eg nobody was applying for an ACX grant to distribute bednets. That made the grants more difficult to evaluate than many popular EA causes, and also made it hard to rely on previous work.
The concern I’m raising is something like “our articles only help for [something like] well established solutions”. Or in other words, there is no situation where [someone is able to vet an org and this was only true because of reading the article]
The other example I have in mind is trying to help people in Israel find an impactful job, especially in tech. We can offer them 100 pages of theory on how to vet companies, but almost no concrete companies to recommend
Scott Alexander had a really hard time evaluating donation causes
EA has a ton of articles about how to evaluate charities
What’s going on?
Should we stop writing these guides?
Do we need better guides?
Do we need some measure like “would this guide make Scott Alexander’s work easier”?
Applicants to ACX grants were almost by definition not working on problems with well-established solutions (in EA or otherwise), eg nobody was applying for an ACX grant to distribute bednets. That made the grants more difficult to evaluate than many popular EA causes, and also made it hard to rely on previous work.
Totally agree
The concern I’m raising is something like “our articles only help for [something like] well established solutions”. Or in other words, there is no situation where [someone is able to vet an org and this was only true because of reading the article]
The other example I have in mind is trying to help people in Israel find an impactful job, especially in tech. We can offer them 100 pages of theory on how to vet companies, but almost no concrete companies to recommend
If only someone was working on how to evaluate hard to evaluate projects
Ref for others:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3hH9NRqzGam65mgPG/five-steps-for-quantifying-speculative-interventions