Technological research, especially AI, or perhaps effective educational reform, or improving the scientific community’s norms might very well be vastly more fruitful fields. … by GiveWell’s metrics, they can’t be measured at all!
It is not obvious from the article whether the author even checked that actually no charity evaluated by GiveWell was of this type. For all we know, the author checked they didn’t get into the top 7 list. But there is a possibility that GiveWell actually gave some consideration to them, only to conclude that none of those charities belong to the top list.
That is, the articles feels as if the author automatically concluded that GiveWell is stupid, and didn’t even bother to verify his assumption, only used the top 7 list as an evidence. To convince me otherwise, it would help to quote some text from GiveWell website confirming this. Because I think it is likely that GiveWell considered this topic explicitly, and published their conclusion, whatever it was.
For example, this part:
It is not obvious from the article whether the author even checked that actually no charity evaluated by GiveWell was of this type. For all we know, the author checked they didn’t get into the top 7 list. But there is a possibility that GiveWell actually gave some consideration to them, only to conclude that none of those charities belong to the top list.
That is, the articles feels as if the author automatically concluded that GiveWell is stupid, and didn’t even bother to verify his assumption, only used the top 7 list as an evidence. To convince me otherwise, it would help to quote some text from GiveWell website confirming this. Because I think it is likely that GiveWell considered this topic explicitly, and published their conclusion, whatever it was.