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?
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?