As someone who has sometimes made a similar claim, I find a lot of assessments of others’ work, not just that of EAs, tends to be informal, off-the-record, and discussion-based. I in fact think that EAs with some frequency miss out on a wealth of knowledge due to a widespread and often insistent requirement that knowledge be citable in order to be meaningful. There are very strong reasons to greatly prefer and put greater weight on citable knowledge, but there is A LOT of intelligence that people do not share in recorded formats for a variety of reasons, such as effort and reputational risks.
So I believe some lack of answers to this may be due to critiques of EA work being shared e.g. verbally, rather than more formally. Personally, I’ve discussed EA work with at least 4 quite prominent economists, at least 2 of whom I believed had reviewed some significant aspect of EA research and perspective thoroughly, but I have not really shared these accounts. To be sharable, I’d likely require more time and attention of these economists than I’m easily able to get, in order to ensure I provided both full and proper explanation and sufficient guarantee of anonymity.
Do you feel comfortable giving some general impression of what the economists’ views were (e.g. “one favorable, two mixed, one unfavorable”)? If not, that’s understandable!
I would expect EA to have a weaker insistence on citable knowledge than people in other academic fields; do you think the insistence is actually stronger? (Or are most people in academic fields wrong, and EA isn’t an exception?)
As someone who has sometimes made a similar claim, I find a lot of assessments of others’ work, not just that of EAs, tends to be informal, off-the-record, and discussion-based. I in fact think that EAs with some frequency miss out on a wealth of knowledge due to a widespread and often insistent requirement that knowledge be citable in order to be meaningful. There are very strong reasons to greatly prefer and put greater weight on citable knowledge, but there is A LOT of intelligence that people do not share in recorded formats for a variety of reasons, such as effort and reputational risks.
So I believe some lack of answers to this may be due to critiques of EA work being shared e.g. verbally, rather than more formally. Personally, I’ve discussed EA work with at least 4 quite prominent economists, at least 2 of whom I believed had reviewed some significant aspect of EA research and perspective thoroughly, but I have not really shared these accounts. To be sharable, I’d likely require more time and attention of these economists than I’m easily able to get, in order to ensure I provided both full and proper explanation and sufficient guarantee of anonymity.
Do you feel comfortable giving some general impression of what the economists’ views were (e.g. “one favorable, two mixed, one unfavorable”)? If not, that’s understandable!
I would expect EA to have a weaker insistence on citable knowledge than people in other academic fields; do you think the insistence is actually stronger? (Or are most people in academic fields wrong, and EA isn’t an exception?)