This post is now five years old. It seems to me that EA has shifted from where is was five years ago (not that I was around back then), and it seems that people in EA largely share your concerns. It is generally recognized that doing good effectively is a very complex challenge, much of which is hard to quantify, but that we should try our best to figure out how to do it (witness the increasing popularity of global priorities research).
I don’t like it when people “burn the candle from both ends”. You complain about over-reliance on quantitative measures—but also about the use of “heuristic justification” with insufficient research. You don’t offer examples, but the latter complaint brings to my mind comments on EA forums—or lesswrong forums for that matter—in which people propose interventions based on their intuition. But can we really expect more from comment sections? At least in EA, unlike most other communities, the norm is to recognize we might be wrong and seriously consider criticism.
This post is now five years old. It seems to me that EA has shifted from where is was five years ago (not that I was around back then), and it seems that people in EA largely share your concerns. It is generally recognized that doing good effectively is a very complex challenge, much of which is hard to quantify, but that we should try our best to figure out how to do it (witness the increasing popularity of global priorities research).
I don’t like it when people “burn the candle from both ends”. You complain about over-reliance on quantitative measures—but also about the use of “heuristic justification” with insufficient research. You don’t offer examples, but the latter complaint brings to my mind comments on EA forums—or lesswrong forums for that matter—in which people propose interventions based on their intuition. But can we really expect more from comment sections? At least in EA, unlike most other communities, the norm is to recognize we might be wrong and seriously consider criticism.