I sometimes see people claim that EA research tends to be low-quality or "not taken seriously" by scholars in relevant fields.
There are cases where this clearly isn't true (e.g. AI alignment questions seem to have at least split the scholarly community, with a lot of people on both sites).
But I worry that, as a non-scientist, I'm living in a bubble where I don't see strong critique of GiveWell's methodology, FHI's policy papers, etc.
Does anyone have good examples of respected* scholars who have reviewed EA research and either praised it highly or found it lackluster?
*I'm using this word to mean a combination of "regarded highly within their field" and "regarded reasonably well by EAs who care about their field"; if you're not sure whether someone counts, please share the example anyway!
Specifically, I'm looking for reviews of EA research that doesn't go through peer-reviewed research channels, or that gets published in very obscure journals that separate it from being "mainstream" within its field. Examples include:
- Eric Drexler's Comprehensive AI Services model
- Wild animal suffering (especially attempts to estimate its magnitude or compare it to human suffering on a moral basis)
- GiveWell's cost-effectiveness models
- X-risk policy work from FHI, CSER, or other longtermist research orgs
- Recent EA discussion of COVID-19
An example of feedback that fits what I'm looking for:
- Judea Pearl, a renowned computer scientist, reviewing Stuart Russell's Human Compatible:
- "Human Compatible made me a convert to Russell's concerns with our ability to control our upcoming creation -- super-intelligent machines. Unlike outside alarmists and futurists, Russell is a leading authority on AI. His new book will educate the public about AI more than any book I can think of, and is a delightful and uplifting read."
As someone who has sometimes made a similar claim, I find a lot of assessments of others' work, not just that of EAs, tends to be informal, off-the-record, and discussion-based. I in fact think that EAs with some frequency miss out on a wealth of knowledge due to a widespread and often insistent requirement that knowledge be citable in order to be meaningful. There are very strong reasons to greatly prefer and put greater weight on citable knowledge, but there is A LOT of intelligence that people do not share in recorded formats for a variety of reasons, such as effort and reputational risks.
So I believe some lack of answers to this may be due to critiques of EA work being shared e.g. verbally, rather than more formally. Personally, I've discussed EA work with at least 4 quite prominent economists, at least 2 of whom I believed had reviewed some significant aspect of EA research and perspective thoroughly, but I have not really shared these accounts. To be sharable, I'd likely require more time and attention of these economists than I'm easily able to get, in order to ensure I provided both full and proper explanation and sufficient guarantee of anonymity.
Do you feel comfortable giving some general impression of what the economists' views were (e.g. "one favorable, two mixed, one unfavorable")? If not, that's understandable!
I would expect EA to have a weaker insistence on citable knowledge than people in other academic fields; do you think the insistence is actually stronger? (Or are most people in academic fields wrong, and EA isn't an exception?)