I'm considering writing about "RCTs in NGOs: When (and when not) to implement them"
The post would explore:
- Why many new NGOs feel pressured to conduct RCTs primarily due to funder / EA community requirements.
- The hidden costs and limitations of RCTs: high expenses, 80% statistical power meaning 20% chance of missing real effects, wide confidence intervals
- Why RCTs might not be the best tool for early-stage organizations focused on iterative learning
- How academic incentives in RCT design/implementation don't always align with NGO needs
- Alternative evidence-gathering approaches that might be more appropriate for different organizational stages
- Suggestions for both funders and NGOs on how to think about evidence generation
This comes from my conversations with several NGO founders. I believe the EA community could benefit from a more nuanced discussion about evidence hierarchies and when different types of evaluation make sense.
A history of ITRI, Taiwan's national electronics R&D institute. It was established in 1973, when Taiwan's income was less than Pakistan's income today. Yet it was single-handedly responsible for the rise of Taiwan's electronics industry, spinning out UMC, MediaTek and most notably TSMC. To give you a sense of how insane this is, imagine that Bangladesh announced today that they were going to start doing frontier AI R&D, and in 2045 they were the leaders in AI. ITRI is arguably the most successful development initiative in history, but I've never seen it brought up in either the metascience/progress community or the global dev community.
Fascinating, I've never heard of this before, thanks! If anyone's curious, I had Deep Research [take a stab at writing this] (https://chatgpt.com/share/67ac150e-ac90-800a-9f49-f02489dee8d0) which I found pretty interesting (but have totally not fact checked for accuracy)