By “priced in,” I meant something like—you shouldn’t be counting the benefits from the cases where you lose anyway, otherwise you end up effectively double-counting contributions.
On trusting GiveWell:
Apple knows much, much more about what makes a smartphone good than I do. They’ve put huge amounts of research into it. Therefore I shouldn’t try to build my own smartphone (because I expect there are genuinely huge returns to scale). This doesn’t mean that I should defer to Apple’s judgment about whether I should buy a smartphone, or which one to buy.
Samsung’s also put much, much more work than I have into what the optimal arrangement of a smartphone is. That doesn’t help me decide whether to buy an iPhone or a Samsung.
McDonald’s has put similarly huge amounts of expert work into figuring out how to optimally produce hamburgers than I have, but I still expect that I can easily produce a much higher-quality product in my own home, so it’s not even always the case that some types of returns to scale mean one can’t compete on small batches.
Givewell is different than those examples certainly. Your examples all include a clear motive to convince people to use their product, even if there are better out there. Givewell are analysts, not producers of good, and are explicitly trying to guide people to the best choice (within a set of constraints).
A better example would be choosing a restaurant. Michelin and Yelp have far more data and have put far more work into evaluating and rating food providers than you ever can. But you still need to figure out how your preferences fit into their evaluation framework, and navigate the always-changing landscape to make an actual choice.
(note that the conclusion is the same: you still must expend some search cost
Givewell are analysts, not producers of good, and are explicitly trying to guide people to the best choice (within a set of constraints).
A lot of the mission of Givewell is also EA movement building. By advocating the standard that evidence is important existing charities will focus on on finding evidence for their claims.
I don’t think “incentive” cuts at the joints here, but selection pressure does. You’re going to hear about the best self-promoters targeting you, which is only an indicator of qualities you care about to the extent that those qualities contributes to self-promotion in that market.
Personal experience: I occasionally use Yelp, but in some cases it’s worse than useless because I care about a pretty high standard of food quality, and often Yelp restaurant reviews are about whether the waiter was nice, the restaurant seemed fancy, the portions were big, sometimes people mark restaurants down for having inventive & therefore challenging food, etc. So I often get better information from the Chowhound message board, which no one except foodies has heard of.
By “priced in,” I meant something like—you shouldn’t be counting the benefits from the cases where you lose anyway, otherwise you end up effectively double-counting contributions.
On trusting GiveWell:
Apple knows much, much more about what makes a smartphone good than I do. They’ve put huge amounts of research into it. Therefore I shouldn’t try to build my own smartphone (because I expect there are genuinely huge returns to scale). This doesn’t mean that I should defer to Apple’s judgment about whether I should buy a smartphone, or which one to buy.
Samsung’s also put much, much more work than I have into what the optimal arrangement of a smartphone is. That doesn’t help me decide whether to buy an iPhone or a Samsung.
McDonald’s has put similarly huge amounts of expert work into figuring out how to optimally produce hamburgers than I have, but I still expect that I can easily produce a much higher-quality product in my own home, so it’s not even always the case that some types of returns to scale mean one can’t compete on small batches.
Do you think GiveWell’s substantially different?
Givewell is different than those examples certainly. Your examples all include a clear motive to convince people to use their product, even if there are better out there. Givewell are analysts, not producers of good, and are explicitly trying to guide people to the best choice (within a set of constraints).
A better example would be choosing a restaurant. Michelin and Yelp have far more data and have put far more work into evaluating and rating food providers than you ever can. But you still need to figure out how your preferences fit into their evaluation framework, and navigate the always-changing landscape to make an actual choice.
(note that the conclusion is the same: you still must expend some search cost
A lot of the mission of Givewell is also EA movement building. By advocating the standard that evidence is important existing charities will focus on on finding evidence for their claims.
I don’t think “incentive” cuts at the joints here, but selection pressure does. You’re going to hear about the best self-promoters targeting you, which is only an indicator of qualities you care about to the extent that those qualities contributes to self-promotion in that market.
Personal experience: I occasionally use Yelp, but in some cases it’s worse than useless because I care about a pretty high standard of food quality, and often Yelp restaurant reviews are about whether the waiter was nice, the restaurant seemed fancy, the portions were big, sometimes people mark restaurants down for having inventive & therefore challenging food, etc. So I often get better information from the Chowhound message board, which no one except foodies has heard of.