My notes on what I liked about the post, from the announcement:
There’s not much I can say about this post, other than: “Read it and learn”. It’s just a smorgasbord of specific, well-cited examples of ways in which one of the fundamental activities of effective altruism can go awry.
I will note that I appreciate examples of ways in which cost-effectiveness estimates could underestimate the true impact of an action. Posts on this topic often focus only on overestimation, which sometimes makes the whole enterprise of doing good seem faintly underwhelming (should we assume that every estimate we hear is too high? Probably not).
This post was awarded an EA Forum Prize; see the prize announcement for more details.
My notes on what I liked about the post, from the announcement: