You could stand to be more explicit in your reasoning. At the moment it seems to go like this:
One paper that found big benefits from deworming has recently been subject to criticism, which criticism has in turn been criticized, etc.
GiveWell posted some discussion of the debate that you think doesn’t engage with the meat of the issue.
It seems to me to engage with quite a lot, and you don’t say what it is you think they aren’t engaging with.
Therefore GiveWell are inept.
Therefore, giving to GiveWell’s recommended charities is worse than, and I quote, buying healthier food for yourself.
It seems to me that no part of this argument makes much sense. There are intelligent experts on both sides of the “worm wars”; GiveWell’s reasoning doesn’t seem obviously crazy to me (their support for deworming was never entirely based on M&K’s findings; many of those findings hold up under the currently-debated reanalysis; the EA case for deworming was always that although the effectiveness of deworming is highly uncertain it’s really really cheap and the current estimates of its cost-effectiveness would need to be too high by an order of magnitude or more for it to stop being better than, e.g. giving money directly to the beneficiaries—which, you may note, is an intervention that GiveWell are also recommending, so it’s not as if they aren’t discounting deworming somewhat on account of the uncertainty); none of this seems to justify the extremely strong words you use.
If you have a more detailed argument that actually gets from the available evidence to “the EA movement is hopelessly messed up”, let’s hear it. That would be interesting and important. But for the moment I’m afraid I’ve got you in the same mental pigeonhole as others who’ve come along to LW and said “I’ve found some nits to pick with something EAs tend to approve of; therefore we should give up the whole idea of charity and concentrate on benefitting ourselves”.
My arguments weren’t meant to be logically water tight to lead to an undeniable position refuting a particular position, they were meant to start a discussion.
Why is it messed up? Lack of competition. Why is there so little competition in the cause prioritization space? Why aren’t there more organisations saying EA’s, donate to this best cause? Some may say it’s an economy of scale thing, but I feel like it has lead to EA orgs becoming quite methodologically lazy. While there are lots of incredible strengths, we also have weaknesses and despite open solicitation for criticism, whenever I for one criticise aspects of the movement I get shot down without my actual arguments getting shot down.
I hate to keep being the resident cost-effectiveness skeptic/denialist and getting tonnes of downvotes for it (but someone has to be the Red Team in the EA movement), but I wanted to clarify and admit that I misunderstood much of the controversy around deworming and that is it contained to: 1) the impact of MASS deworming v.s. individual deworming), which is relevant to deciding whether charitable deworming (like Deworm the world or SCI) rather than user fee style deworming (private businesses, charity distortion free, free markets) is appropriate and (2) whether deworming is actually that much a good public health intervention. I like effective altruism cause I have a very low tolerance for the idea that I might be donating to wasteful causes, and I feel like this is something that would concern many EA’s and we ought to investigate it. I wish an informal committee of some sort was convened to routinely challenge or dogmas cause I feel we have been stagnating and are increasingly becoming complacent, naïve (see GiveWell’s underwhelming responses to the Cochrane review disfavourful of deworming) and thus increasingly unsexy. Ps. I feel like altruism is way to contentious a word for a movement that could be less about ‘ethics’ and other vague philosophical vocabulary and more about economy and charity, which describes what we actually do.
Why aren’t there more organisations saying EA’s, donate to this best cause?
Because most people don’t value everyone’s welfare equally, and that’s a basic assumption of EA. It’s like asking why there aren’t more organizations selling lollipops containing insects.
You could stand to be more explicit in your reasoning. At the moment it seems to go like this:
One paper that found big benefits from deworming has recently been subject to criticism, which criticism has in turn been criticized, etc.
GiveWell posted some discussion of the debate that you think doesn’t engage with the meat of the issue.
It seems to me to engage with quite a lot, and you don’t say what it is you think they aren’t engaging with.
Therefore GiveWell are inept.
Therefore, giving to GiveWell’s recommended charities is worse than, and I quote, buying healthier food for yourself.
It seems to me that no part of this argument makes much sense. There are intelligent experts on both sides of the “worm wars”; GiveWell’s reasoning doesn’t seem obviously crazy to me (their support for deworming was never entirely based on M&K’s findings; many of those findings hold up under the currently-debated reanalysis; the EA case for deworming was always that although the effectiveness of deworming is highly uncertain it’s really really cheap and the current estimates of its cost-effectiveness would need to be too high by an order of magnitude or more for it to stop being better than, e.g. giving money directly to the beneficiaries—which, you may note, is an intervention that GiveWell are also recommending, so it’s not as if they aren’t discounting deworming somewhat on account of the uncertainty); none of this seems to justify the extremely strong words you use.
If you have a more detailed argument that actually gets from the available evidence to “the EA movement is hopelessly messed up”, let’s hear it. That would be interesting and important. But for the moment I’m afraid I’ve got you in the same mental pigeonhole as others who’ve come along to LW and said “I’ve found some nits to pick with something EAs tend to approve of; therefore we should give up the whole idea of charity and concentrate on benefitting ourselves”.
My arguments weren’t meant to be logically water tight to lead to an undeniable position refuting a particular position, they were meant to start a discussion.
Why is it messed up? Lack of competition. Why is there so little competition in the cause prioritization space? Why aren’t there more organisations saying EA’s, donate to this best cause? Some may say it’s an economy of scale thing, but I feel like it has lead to EA orgs becoming quite methodologically lazy. While there are lots of incredible strengths, we also have weaknesses and despite open solicitation for criticism, whenever I for one criticise aspects of the movement I get shot down without my actual arguments getting shot down.
I hate to keep being the resident cost-effectiveness skeptic/denialist and getting tonnes of downvotes for it (but someone has to be the Red Team in the EA movement), but I wanted to clarify and admit that I misunderstood much of the controversy around deworming and that is it contained to: 1) the impact of MASS deworming v.s. individual deworming), which is relevant to deciding whether charitable deworming (like Deworm the world or SCI) rather than user fee style deworming (private businesses, charity distortion free, free markets) is appropriate and (2) whether deworming is actually that much a good public health intervention. I like effective altruism cause I have a very low tolerance for the idea that I might be donating to wasteful causes, and I feel like this is something that would concern many EA’s and we ought to investigate it. I wish an informal committee of some sort was convened to routinely challenge or dogmas cause I feel we have been stagnating and are increasingly becoming complacent, naïve (see GiveWell’s underwhelming responses to the Cochrane review disfavourful of deworming) and thus increasingly unsexy. Ps. I feel like altruism is way to contentious a word for a movement that could be less about ‘ethics’ and other vague philosophical vocabulary and more about economy and charity, which describes what we actually do.
Because most people don’t value everyone’s welfare equally, and that’s a basic assumption of EA. It’s like asking why there aren’t more organizations selling lollipops containing insects.