I agree that it may be counterproductive to divide people who are answering the same questions into different camps and, on re-reading, that is how my post may come across. My more limited intention was to provide a (crude) framework through which we might be able to understand the disagreement.
I guess I had always interpreted (perhaps falsely) EA as making a stronger claim than âwe should be more reasonable when deciding how to do goodâ. In particular I feel that there used to be more of a focus on âhardâ rather than âsoftâ evidence. This helps explain why EA used to advocate charitable giving over advocacy work /â systemic change, for which hard evidence is necessarily more limited. It seems EA is now a broader church and this is probably for the better but in departing from a preference for hard evidence/âRCTs it has lost its claim to being like evidence-based medicine.
The strength of this evolution is that EA seems to have absorbed thoughtful critiques such as that of Acemoglu
http://ââbostonreview.net/ââforum/ââlogic-effective-altruism/ââdaron-acemoglu-response-effective-altruism although I imagine it must have been quite annoying to be told that âif X offers some prospect of doing good, then EAs will do itâ when we werenât at the time. Perhaps EA is growing so broad that the only real opponents they have left are the anti-rationalists like John Gray (although the more opponents he has the better)
Thanks both for thoughtful replies and links.
I agree that it may be counterproductive to divide people who are answering the same questions into different camps and, on re-reading, that is how my post may come across. My more limited intention was to provide a (crude) framework through which we might be able to understand the disagreement.
I guess I had always interpreted (perhaps falsely) EA as making a stronger claim than âwe should be more reasonable when deciding how to do goodâ. In particular I feel that there used to be more of a focus on âhardâ rather than âsoftâ evidence. This helps explain why EA used to advocate charitable giving over advocacy work /â systemic change, for which hard evidence is necessarily more limited. It seems EA is now a broader church and this is probably for the better but in departing from a preference for hard evidence/âRCTs it has lost its claim to being like evidence-based medicine.
The strength of this evolution is that EA seems to have absorbed thoughtful critiques such as that of Acemoglu http://ââbostonreview.net/ââforum/ââlogic-effective-altruism/ââdaron-acemoglu-response-effective-altruism although I imagine it must have been quite annoying to be told that âif X offers some prospect of doing good, then EAs will do itâ when we werenât at the time. Perhaps EA is growing so broad that the only real opponents they have left are the anti-rationalists like John Gray (although the more opponents he has the better)