I’d also like to see targeted interaction and outreach to the academic research community.
GiveWell has a good model of validating and checking intuitions against prominent people in development, but seems to opt for public intellectuals over less famous experts in the field who’s thinking those public intellectuals may defer to.
In the EA community, I feel this has lead to such confidence in deworming, when deworming is actually one of if not the most controversial topics in academic impact evaluation (nicknamed worm wars. And DALY’s are the pariah outside of specific subcommunities of impact analysis looking to the future, not immediate use.
There may be many similar misunderstandings in the rationality community which are taken for granted. But unlike the EA community, the rationalist community seems to be less transparent. MIRI technical research agenda is still secret, amongst other things..
By contrasts, I can go on GiveWell, which in some ways isn’t part of the EA community so much as the inspiration for it, and see how they think they think and reason to be skeptical about charity cleanly laid out, without even going into their methodology. Be warmed, ordinary readers, I’m playing the critic here. MIRI is much more technically complicated that GiveWell, I’m just trying to give criticism to be constructive. Path dependence and novelty of MIRI’s agenda, amongst other things, are obvious barriers to doing things the EA way in the rationalist community.
Btw, I think you’ve misspelled ‘community’. Some members of the community seem really neurotic about that sort of thing and it would be shame if you were downvoted or missed upvotes for something as trivial as that.
I’d also like to see targeted interaction and outreach to the academic research community.
GiveWell has a good model of validating and checking intuitions against prominent people in development, but seems to opt for public intellectuals over less famous experts in the field who’s thinking those public intellectuals may defer to. In the EA community, I feel this has lead to such confidence in deworming, when deworming is actually one of if not the most controversial topics in academic impact evaluation (nicknamed worm wars. And DALY’s are the pariah outside of specific subcommunities of impact analysis looking to the future, not immediate use.
There may be many similar misunderstandings in the rationality community which are taken for granted. But unlike the EA community, the rationalist community seems to be less transparent. MIRI technical research agenda is still secret, amongst other things..
By contrasts, I can go on GiveWell, which in some ways isn’t part of the EA community so much as the inspiration for it, and see how they think they think and reason to be skeptical about charity cleanly laid out, without even going into their methodology. Be warmed, ordinary readers, I’m playing the critic here. MIRI is much more technically complicated that GiveWell, I’m just trying to give criticism to be constructive. Path dependence and novelty of MIRI’s agenda, amongst other things, are obvious barriers to doing things the EA way in the rationalist community.
Btw, I think you’ve misspelled ‘community’. Some members of the community seem really neurotic about that sort of thing and it would be shame if you were downvoted or missed upvotes for something as trivial as that.