“If I accepted every claim in his piece, I’d come away with the belief that some EA charities are bad in a bunch of random ways, but believe nothing that imperils my core belief in the goodness of the effective altruism movement or, indeed, in the charities that Wenar critiques.”
I agree—but I think Wenar does a very good job of pointing out specific weaknesses. If he alternatively framed this piece as “how EA should improve” (which is how I mentally steelman every EA hit-piece that I read), it would be an excellent piece. Under his current framing of “EA bad”, I think it is a very unsuccessful piece.
I think these are his very good and perceptive criticisms:
Global health and development EA does not adequately account for side-effects, unintended consequences and perverse incentives caused by different interventions in its expected-value calculations, and does not adequately advertise these risks to potential donors. Weirdly, I don’t think I’ve come across this criticism of EA before despite it seeming very obvious. I think this might be because people are polarised between “aid bad” and “aid good”, leaving very few people saying “aid good overall but you should be transparent about downsides of interventions you are supporting”.
The use of quantitative impact estimates by EAs can mislead audiences into overestimating the quality of quantitative empirical evidence supporting these estimates.
Expected-value calculations rooted in probabilities derived from belief (as opposed to probabilities derived from empirical evidence) are prone to motivated reasoning and self-serving biases.
I’ve previously discussed weaknesses of expected-value calculations on the forum and have suggested some actionable tools to improve them.
I think Givewell should definitely clarify what they think the most likely negative side-effects and risks of the programs they recommend are, and how severe they think the side-effects are.
I don’t think the third question is a good faith question.
This is the context for how Wenar used the phrase: “And he’s accountable to the people there—in the way all of us are accountable to the real, flesh-and-blood humans we love.”″
I interpret this as “direct interaction with individuals you are helping ensures accountability, i.e, they have a mechanism to object to and stop what you are doing”. This contrasts with aid programs delivered by hierarchical organisations where locals cannot interact with decision makers, so cannot effectively oppose programs they do not want, eg—the deworming incident where parents were angry.