(NOTE: I wrote this response when the post was much shorter, and ended at “I do not care about evidence when people are dying.”)
First off—a linkpost is a link to the exact same post that has been written somewhere else, rather than an inspiration or a source like the original “Against RCT” post. That’s a small thing.
Secondly—people did think about the kids in the PlayPump story. With the benefit of hindsight, we now know the PlayPumps were a bad idea, but that’s not how it seemed at the time. It seemed like the kids would get to play (hence the name) and the village would naturally get water as a result. That’s a win-win! No need to take kids out of school, and providing access to clean water would have been a great thing. It didn’t work out that way, but the narrative was compelling—evidence about how it actually works is the thing that was missing.
Thirdly, it seems strange to say that you don’t care about evidence. You claim:
”With common sense it is obvious that we have to invest billions to build a water public company in Africa and to build the infrastructure to allow every citizen to get fresh and clean water.(this is solve root problem with common sense)”
How would we work out how to achieve this, without using evidence? For that matter, how do we know people in Africa need clean water at all? Sure, it’s common knowledge now, but how did the people who originally reported on it find out? Did they close their eyes and think really hard, and then open their eyes and say “I bet there’s a country called Africa, and people live there, and they need clean water”, or did people actually ask Africans or look at conditions in Africa, and find out what was going on?
Less facetiously, there’s a whole bunch of questions that would need to be asked in order to complete this project. Questions like:
Would these countries allow this company to be built? Who should be in charge of it? Can we actually provide this infrastructure? How maintainable is the infrastructure? What will the expected costs and benefits actually be?
The lesson of the PlayPumps is that you can’t answer all these questions by telling a nice story—you have to actually go out and do the research about how things might go in the real world, and then at least you have a chance of getting it right. The world is complicated—things that seem compelling aren’t always possible or useful. The only way we know about that can even somewhat reliably tell the difference is with evidence, ideally as empirical (i.e, as close to the source of what’s really happening) as possible.
The key insight from this post I am trying to convey is not “You can’t criticise these things”, but rather—if you’re going to criticise these things, you need to present a counterargument against the actual reasons EA believes in these things. Why do the benefits of evidence not apply here? What method can we use, other than evidence-gathering, to be sure that this project is the best project we could be doing and will actually work as intended?
In addition to raising several further problems, I don’t actually see how this solution actually solves any of the problems I brought up in my previous comment.
(NOTE: I wrote this response when the post was much shorter, and ended at “I do not care about evidence when people are dying.”)
First off—a linkpost is a link to the exact same post that has been written somewhere else, rather than an inspiration or a source like the original “Against RCT” post. That’s a small thing.
Secondly—people did think about the kids in the PlayPump story. With the benefit of hindsight, we now know the PlayPumps were a bad idea, but that’s not how it seemed at the time. It seemed like the kids would get to play (hence the name) and the village would naturally get water as a result. That’s a win-win! No need to take kids out of school, and providing access to clean water would have been a great thing. It didn’t work out that way, but the narrative was compelling—evidence about how it actually works is the thing that was missing.
Thirdly, it seems strange to say that you don’t care about evidence. You claim:
”With common sense it is obvious that we have to invest billions to build a water public company in Africa and to build the infrastructure to allow every citizen to get fresh and clean water.(this is solve root problem with common sense)”
How would we work out how to achieve this, without using evidence? For that matter, how do we know people in Africa need clean water at all? Sure, it’s common knowledge now, but how did the people who originally reported on it find out? Did they close their eyes and think really hard, and then open their eyes and say “I bet there’s a country called Africa, and people live there, and they need clean water”, or did people actually ask Africans or look at conditions in Africa, and find out what was going on?
Less facetiously, there’s a whole bunch of questions that would need to be asked in order to complete this project. Questions like:
Would these countries allow this company to be built?
Who should be in charge of it?
Can we actually provide this infrastructure?
How maintainable is the infrastructure?
What will the expected costs and benefits actually be?
The lesson of the PlayPumps is that you can’t answer all these questions by telling a nice story—you have to actually go out and do the research about how things might go in the real world, and then at least you have a chance of getting it right. The world is complicated—things that seem compelling aren’t always possible or useful. The only way we know about that can even somewhat reliably tell the difference is with evidence, ideally as empirical (i.e, as close to the source of what’s really happening) as possible.
The key insight from this post I am trying to convey is not “You can’t criticise these things”, but rather—if you’re going to criticise these things, you need to present a counterargument against the actual reasons EA believes in these things. Why do the benefits of evidence not apply here? What method can we use, other than evidence-gathering, to be sure that this project is the best project we could be doing and will actually work as intended?
SOLUTION: EA has to allow 8B people to vote where allocate the Charity Money, full stop.
WHY just an elite deciding ?
In addition to raising several further problems, I don’t actually see how this solution actually solves any of the problems I brought up in my previous comment.