How can we trust the findings of EA organisations? It is a genuine possibility that I will change the entire course of my life as a result of the information on 80k hours. I guess many of you already have. Have you checked all of their reasoning? What percentage ought one to check? Or you trust someone else to have done that "due diligence"?
It's not enough to say they are transparent and seem honest - I know plenty of misguided transparent honest people. The issue is that EA organisations might be wrong, not in what they don't know (we cannot avoid being wrong in what we don't know) but in what they do - like a mistaken mathematical proof, their logic might be flawed or their sums might be off. This, by our own logic, would likely have disastrous results.
Frankly, someone needs to be checking their notes and I am not skilled enough, nor do I want to. I have yet to see this in regard to say 80k hours.
In this sense I can imagine three solutions:
Firstly, some sort of independent auditing body. They could read the works of EA organisations and attempt to see if the logic holds, flag up areas where decisions seem arbitrary etc. We would be paying someone to just be really on top of this stuff as their main job and to tell us if they found anything worrying. Arguably this forum kind of does this job, though A) we are all tremendously biased B) are people *really* checking the minutiae? I am not.
Secondly, multiple organisations independently asking the same questions. What if there were another 80k hours (called say, "Nine Years") which didn't try to interact with them, but sought answers to the same problems. "Nine Years" could publish their research and then we could read both summaries and then investigate areas of difference.
Thirdly, publish papers on our explanations as if they were mathematical (perhaps in philosophy journals). Perhaps this already happens (I guess if this post takes off I might research it more), but you could publish rigid testable explanations of the theories which undergird EA as an ideology. It seems well being (for instance) is very poorly defined. I'll explain more if people are interested, (read Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity) but suffice it to say that to avoid being wrong you want to be definite so you can change. Is our ideology falsifiable? Sometimes EA seems very vague to me in its explanational underpinnings. If you can vary easily, it's hard to be wrong, and if you're never wrong, you never get better. I don't know if journals are the way to go but it seemed the easiest way to clearly suggest becoming more rigid.
Caveats
I do not know enough about EA - I've read about 20 hours of it in my life. Perhaps mechanisms like this already exist or you have reason to not require them.
I recently left religion and for that reason would like to know that I am not fooling myself here also. "Trust EA organisations because they are good" doesn't hold much water since the logic applies elsewhere - "Trust the Church because it is good"?
Summary
I think it would be good to have a mechanism for ensuring that we are not fooling ourselves here. EA redirects a huge number of person-hours and flaws in it could be catastrophic. I don't know what those are, but have got a few suggestions and am interested in your suggestions or criticisms of the ideas suggested here.
Donald Knuth is a Stanford professor and world-renowned computer scientist. For years he offered cash prizes to anyone who could find an error in any of his books. The amount of money was only a few dollars, but there's a lot of status associated with receiving a Knuth check. People would frame them instead of cashing them.
Why don't more people do this? Like having a bug bounty program, but for your beliefs. Offer some cash and public recognition to anyone who can correct a factual error you've made or convince you that you're wrong about something. Donald Freakin' Knuth has cut over two thousand reward checks, and us mortals probably make mistakes at a higher rate than he does.
Everyone could do this: organizations, textbooks, newspapers, individuals. If you care about having correct beliefs, create an incentive for others to help you out.
$2 via Paypal to the first person who convinces me this practice is harmful.
This practice works when applied to a book, but would be harmful if applied to your entire life. I make factual errors all the time - sometimes I'm wrong about what the canteen is serving today or I misremember the capital of Niger - but it's not worth paying people to point it out.
In particular, the admin cost would be very heavy. Imagine you spend five minutes sending someone money every time you notice you made a mistake. You could easily spend 10-30 minutes every day just sending people money. Wouldn't that time be better spent working or reading or sleeping?
In fact, I think you would quickly be incentivized not to say anything you're uncertain about. At best, it would lead to excessive hedging which would make you appear less confident and likely hurt your career. At worst, you'd be so loathe to make a mistake that you wouldn't speak up on a topic you're uncertain about, even if your contributions could help someone.
I think you make solid points, though I think you could limit it to some type of important post and certain types of concepts. eg "only when I state something as true in my blog posts"
Likewise, I often think declaring our uncertainty would be better for us as a species. Learning to should "I don't know" as loudly as the yesses and nos in a debate would I think be helpful to most debates also.
I love this idea.
Relatedly: if you have a website you're sometimes spammed by bots that tell you that you have grammar mistakes, broken links or that they can help you reduce the loading time of your page.
Perhaps there's a business idea here somewhere, where you 'mass tell' people they've incorrect statistics/beliefs etc. on their website, which they can find behind a $X paywall. Also see: http://statcheck.io/
This is a clever/fun idea.
How much money do you have? How often are you wrong? To what extent do you want people to try and correct you all the time?
Actually I think it's a really good idea and if you try it, let me know how it works out.