My first thought on reading this suggestion for working groups was “That’s a great idea, I’d really support someone trying to set that up!”
My second thought was “I would absolutely not have wanted to do that as a student. Where would I even begin?”
My third thought was that even if you did organise a group of people to try implementing the frameworks of EA to build some recommendations from scratch, this will never compare to the research done by long-standing organisations that dedicate many experienced people’s working lives to finding the answers. The conclusion of the project would surely be a sort of verbal participation medal, but you’re best off looking at GiveWell’s charities anyway.
Maybe I’m being overly cynical here. It seems a good way to engage people who could later develop into strong priorities/charity evaluation researchers. I suspect it’s best that any such initiative be administered by people already working to a high standard in those fields for that benefit to be properly reaped, however.
Agreed, hence “I don’t even think the main aim should be to produce novel work”. Imagine something between a Giving Game and producing GiveWell-standard work (much closer to the Giving Game end). Like the Model United Nations idea—it’s just practice.
My first thought on reading this suggestion for working groups was “That’s a great idea, I’d really support someone trying to set that up!”
My second thought was “I would absolutely not have wanted to do that as a student. Where would I even begin?”
My third thought was that even if you did organise a group of people to try implementing the frameworks of EA to build some recommendations from scratch, this will never compare to the research done by long-standing organisations that dedicate many experienced people’s working lives to finding the answers. The conclusion of the project would surely be a sort of verbal participation medal, but you’re best off looking at GiveWell’s charities anyway.
Maybe I’m being overly cynical here. It seems a good way to engage people who could later develop into strong priorities/charity evaluation researchers. I suspect it’s best that any such initiative be administered by people already working to a high standard in those fields for that benefit to be properly reaped, however.
Agreed, hence “I don’t even think the main aim should be to produce novel work”. Imagine something between a Giving Game and producing GiveWell-standard work (much closer to the Giving Game end). Like the Model United Nations idea—it’s just practice.