But there are also ways in which evaluations can have zero or negative impact. The one that worries me the most at the moment is people taking noisy evaluations too seriously, i.e., outsourcing too much of their thinking to imperfect evaluators. Lack of stakeholder buy-in doesn’t seem like that much of a problem for the EA community: Reception for some of my evaluations posts was fairly warm, and funders seem keen to pay for evaluations [emphasis mine]
This doesn’t seem like much evidence to me, for what it’s worth. It seems very plausible to me that there’s enough stakeholder buy-in that people are willing to pay for evaluations in the off-chance they’re useful (or worse, willing to get the brand advantages of being someone who is willing to pay for evaluations), but this is very consistent with people not paying as much attention/as willing to change direction based on imperfect evaluators as they ought to.
This doesn’t seem like much evidence to me, for what it’s worth. It seems very plausible to me that there’s enough stakeholder buy-in that people are willing to pay for evaluations in the off-chance they’re useful (or worse, willing to get the brand advantages of being someone who is willing to pay for evaluations), but this is very consistent with people not paying as much attention/as willing to change direction based on imperfect evaluators as they ought to.