Now I took a look at your claims about things we’re “ignoring” like sociological theory and case studies. First, you ought to follow the two-paper rule, a field needs to show relevance. Not every line of work is valuable. Just because they have peer review and the author has a PhD doesn’t mean they’ve accomplished something that is useful for our particular purposes. We have limited time to read stuff.
Second, some of that research really is irrelevant for our purposes. There are a lot of reasons why. Sometimes the research is just poor quality or not replicable or generalizeable; social theory can be vulnerable to this. Another issue is that here in EA we are worried about one movement and just a few high priority causes. We don’t need a sweeping theory of social change, we need to know what works right here and now. This means that domain knowledge (e.g. surveys, experiments, data collection) for our local context is more important than obtaining a generic theory of history and society. Finally, if you think phenomenology and existentialism are relevant, I think you just don’t understand utilitarianism. You want to look at theories of well-being, not these other subfields of philosophy. But even when it comes to theories of well-being, the philosophy is mostly irrelevant because happiness/preferences/etc match up pretty well for all practical intents and purposes (especially given measurement difficulties—we are forced to rely on proxy measures like GDP and happiness surveys anyway).
Third, your claim that these approaches are generally ignored is incorrect.
Historical case studies—See the work on history of philanthropy and field growth done by Open Phil. See the work of ACE on case studies for social movements. And I’m currently working on a project for case studies assessing the risk of catastrophic risks, an evaluation of historical societies to see what they knew and might have done to prevent GCRs if they had thought about it at the time.
Regression analysis—Just… what? This one is bizarre. No one here is ideologically biased against any particular kind of statistical model, we have cited plenty of papers which use regressions.
Overall, I’m pretty disappointed that the EA community has upvoted this post so much, when its arguments are heavily flawed. I think we are overly enthusiastic about anyone who criticizes us, rather than judging them with the same rigor that we judge anyone else.
Another example contradicting your claims about EA: in Candidate Scoring System I went to extensive detail about methodological pluralism. It nails all of the armchair philosophy-of-science stuff about how we need to be open minded about sociological theory and so on. I have a little bit of ethnography in it (my personal observations). It is where I delved into capitalism and socialism as well. It’s written very carefully to dodge the all-too-predictable critique that you’re making here. And what I have done to make it this way has taken up an extensive amount of time, adding no clear amount of accuracy to the results. So you can see it’s a little annoying when someone criticizes the EA movement yet again, without knowledge of this recent work.
Yet, at the end of the day, most of the papers I actually cite are standard economics, criminological studies, political science, and so on. Not ethnographies or sociological theories. Know why? Because when I see ethnographies and sociological theory papers, and I read the abstract and/or the conclusion or skim the contents, I don’t see them giving any information that matters. I can spend all day reading about how veganism apparently green-washes Israel, for instance, but that’s not useful for deciding what policy stance to take towards Israel or farming. It’s just commentary. You are making an incorrect assumption that every line of scholarship that vaguely addresses a topic is going to be useful for EAs who want to actually make progress on it. This is not a question of research rigor, it’s simple facts about what these papers are actually aiming at.
You know what it would look like, if I were determined to include all this stuff? “Butler argues that gender is a social construct. However, just because gender is a social construct doesn’t tell us how quality of life will change if the government bans transgender workplace discrimination. Yeates argues that migration transforms domestic caring into global labor chains. However, just because migration creates global care chains doesn’t tell us how quality of life will change if the government increases low-skill immigration.” And on and on and on. Of course it would be a little more nuanced and complex but you get the idea. Are you interested in sifting through pages of that sort of prose? Does it get us closer to understanding how to improve the world?
Now I took a look at your claims about things we’re “ignoring” like sociological theory and case studies. First, you ought to follow the two-paper rule, a field needs to show relevance. Not every line of work is valuable. Just because they have peer review and the author has a PhD doesn’t mean they’ve accomplished something that is useful for our particular purposes. We have limited time to read stuff.
Second, some of that research really is irrelevant for our purposes. There are a lot of reasons why. Sometimes the research is just poor quality or not replicable or generalizeable; social theory can be vulnerable to this. Another issue is that here in EA we are worried about one movement and just a few high priority causes. We don’t need a sweeping theory of social change, we need to know what works right here and now. This means that domain knowledge (e.g. surveys, experiments, data collection) for our local context is more important than obtaining a generic theory of history and society. Finally, if you think phenomenology and existentialism are relevant, I think you just don’t understand utilitarianism. You want to look at theories of well-being, not these other subfields of philosophy. But even when it comes to theories of well-being, the philosophy is mostly irrelevant because happiness/preferences/etc match up pretty well for all practical intents and purposes (especially given measurement difficulties—we are forced to rely on proxy measures like GDP and happiness surveys anyway).
Third, your claim that these approaches are generally ignored is incorrect.
For sociological theory—see ACE’s concepts of social change.
Historical case studies—See the work on history of philanthropy and field growth done by Open Phil. See the work of ACE on case studies for social movements. And I’m currently working on a project for case studies assessing the risk of catastrophic risks, an evaluation of historical societies to see what they knew and might have done to prevent GCRs if they had thought about it at the time.
Regression analysis—Just… what? This one is bizarre. No one here is ideologically biased against any particular kind of statistical model, we have cited plenty of papers which use regressions.
Overall, I’m pretty disappointed that the EA community has upvoted this post so much, when its arguments are heavily flawed. I think we are overly enthusiastic about anyone who criticizes us, rather than judging them with the same rigor that we judge anyone else.
Another example contradicting your claims about EA: in Candidate Scoring System I went to extensive detail about methodological pluralism. It nails all of the armchair philosophy-of-science stuff about how we need to be open minded about sociological theory and so on. I have a little bit of ethnography in it (my personal observations). It is where I delved into capitalism and socialism as well. It’s written very carefully to dodge the all-too-predictable critique that you’re making here. And what I have done to make it this way has taken up an extensive amount of time, adding no clear amount of accuracy to the results. So you can see it’s a little annoying when someone criticizes the EA movement yet again, without knowledge of this recent work.
Yet, at the end of the day, most of the papers I actually cite are standard economics, criminological studies, political science, and so on. Not ethnographies or sociological theories. Know why? Because when I see ethnographies and sociological theory papers, and I read the abstract and/or the conclusion or skim the contents, I don’t see them giving any information that matters. I can spend all day reading about how veganism apparently green-washes Israel, for instance, but that’s not useful for deciding what policy stance to take towards Israel or farming. It’s just commentary. You are making an incorrect assumption that every line of scholarship that vaguely addresses a topic is going to be useful for EAs who want to actually make progress on it. This is not a question of research rigor, it’s simple facts about what these papers are actually aiming at.
You know what it would look like, if I were determined to include all this stuff? “Butler argues that gender is a social construct. However, just because gender is a social construct doesn’t tell us how quality of life will change if the government bans transgender workplace discrimination. Yeates argues that migration transforms domestic caring into global labor chains. However, just because migration creates global care chains doesn’t tell us how quality of life will change if the government increases low-skill immigration.” And on and on and on. Of course it would be a little more nuanced and complex but you get the idea. Are you interested in sifting through pages of that sort of prose? Does it get us closer to understanding how to improve the world?