Some noteworthy things about Givewell is that it’s not really trying to make all nonprofits accountable to donors (since most nonprofits aren’t even ranked). It’s trying to answer a particular question, for a subset of the donor population.
By contrast, something like CharityNavigator is aiming to cover a broad swath of nonprofits and is more implicitly claiming that all nonprofits should be more accountable-on-average than they currently are.
It’s also noteworthy that Givewell’s paradigm is distinct from the general claims of “nonprofits should be accountable”, or utilitarianism, or other EA frameworks. Givewell is doing one fairly specific thing, which is different from what CharityNavigator or OpenPhil are doing.
I do think CharityNavigator is an important and perhaps relevant example since they’re optimizing a metric that I think is wrong. I think it’s probably still at least somewhat good that CharityNavigator exists, since it moves the overall conversation of “we should be trying to evaluate nonprofits” forward, and creating more transparency than there used to be. I could be persuaded that CharityNavigator was net-negative though.
I’d be pretty worried if a bunch of biology researchers had to decide which physics papers should be published. (This exaggerates the problem, but I think it does qualitatively describe the problem.)
There’s a pretty big distinction between “decide which papers get published.” If some biologists started a journal that dealt with physics (because they thought they had some reason to believe they had a unique and valuable take on Physics And Biology) that might be weird, perhaps bad. But, it wouldn’t be “decide what physics things get published.” It’d be “some biologists start a weird Physics Journal with it’s own kinda weird submission criteria.”
(I think that might potentially be bad, from a “affecting signal/noise ratio” axis, but also I don’t think the metaphor is that good – the only reason it feels potentially bad is because of the huge disconnect between physics and biology, and and “biologists start a journal about some facet of biology that intersects with some other field that’s actually plausibly relevant to biology” feels fine)
If some biologists started a journal that dealt with physics (because they thought they had some reason to believe they had a unique and valuable take on Physics And Biology) that might be weird, perhaps bad. But, it wouldn’t be “decide what physics things get published.” It’d be “some biologists start a weird Physics Journal with it’s own kinda weird submission criteria.”
I in fact meant “decide what physics things get published”; in this counterfactual every physics journal / conference sends their submissions to biologists for peer review and a decision on whether it should be published. I think that is more correctly pointing at the problems I am worried about than “some biologists start a new physics journal”.
Like, it is not the case that there already exists a public evaluation mechanism for work coming out of CHAI / OpenAI / DeepMind. (I guess you could look at whether the papers they produce are published in some top conference, but this isn’t something OpenAI and DeepMind try very hard to do, and in any case that’s a pretty bad evaluation mechanism because it’s evaluating by the standards of the regular AI field, not the standards of AI safety.) So creating a public evaluation mechanism when none exists is automatically going to get some of the legitimacy, at least for non-experts.
On the Givewell example:
Some noteworthy things about Givewell is that it’s not really trying to make all nonprofits accountable to donors (since most nonprofits aren’t even ranked). It’s trying to answer a particular question, for a subset of the donor population.
By contrast, something like CharityNavigator is aiming to cover a broad swath of nonprofits and is more implicitly claiming that all nonprofits should be more accountable-on-average than they currently are.
It’s also noteworthy that Givewell’s paradigm is distinct from the general claims of “nonprofits should be accountable”, or utilitarianism, or other EA frameworks. Givewell is doing one fairly specific thing, which is different from what CharityNavigator or OpenPhil are doing.
I do think CharityNavigator is an important and perhaps relevant example since they’re optimizing a metric that I think is wrong. I think it’s probably still at least somewhat good that CharityNavigator exists, since it moves the overall conversation of “we should be trying to evaluate nonprofits” forward, and creating more transparency than there used to be. I could be persuaded that CharityNavigator was net-negative though.
There’s a pretty big distinction between “decide which papers get published.” If some biologists started a journal that dealt with physics (because they thought they had some reason to believe they had a unique and valuable take on Physics And Biology) that might be weird, perhaps bad. But, it wouldn’t be “decide what physics things get published.” It’d be “some biologists start a weird Physics Journal with it’s own kinda weird submission criteria.”
(I think that might potentially be bad, from a “affecting signal/noise ratio” axis, but also I don’t think the metaphor is that good – the only reason it feels potentially bad is because of the huge disconnect between physics and biology, and and “biologists start a journal about some facet of biology that intersects with some other field that’s actually plausibly relevant to biology” feels fine)
I in fact meant “decide what physics things get published”; in this counterfactual every physics journal / conference sends their submissions to biologists for peer review and a decision on whether it should be published. I think that is more correctly pointing at the problems I am worried about than “some biologists start a new physics journal”.
Like, it is not the case that there already exists a public evaluation mechanism for work coming out of CHAI / OpenAI / DeepMind. (I guess you could look at whether the papers they produce are published in some top conference, but this isn’t something OpenAI and DeepMind try very hard to do, and in any case that’s a pretty bad evaluation mechanism because it’s evaluating by the standards of the regular AI field, not the standards of AI safety.) So creating a public evaluation mechanism when none exists is automatically going to get some of the legitimacy, at least for non-experts.