The point of credentialism is that the ideal circumstances for an individual to evaluate ideas don't exist very often. Medical practitioners aren't always right, and homeopaths or opinion bloggers aren't always wrong, but bearing in mind that I'm seldom well enough versed in the background literature to make my own mind up, trusting the person with the solid credentials over the person with zero or quack credentials is likely to be the best heuristic in the absence of any solid information to the contrary

And yes, of course sometimes it isn't, and sometimes the bar is completely arbitrary (the successful applicant will have some sort of degree from some sort of top 20 university) or the level of distinction irrelevant (his alma mater is more reputable than hers) and sometimes the credentials themselves are suspect 

I'd add that the transitional effects of climate change look like they would have particularly negative effects on poor crop farmers in places like the Indian subcontinent who are unlikely to source much/any of their diet from factory farms, and relatively little effect on wealthy Western consumers who eat particularly large quantities of factory farmed meat (it's even conceivable that price pressures resulting from shortages of some staple crops in some countries could benefit Western factory farms' profitability...), so it's really difficult to see the negative animal welfare impact of slowing climate change down a bit

For the record, I agree that evolutionary mechanisms need not hold any moral force over us, and lean personally towards considering acts to save human lives of being approximately equal value irrespective of distance and whether anyone actually notices or not. But I still think it's a fairly strong counterargument to point out that the vast majority of humanity does attach moral weight to proximity and community links, as do the institutions they design to do good, and for reasons.

This argument is understandably unpopular because it's inconsistent with core principles of EA. 

But the principle of reciprocity (and adjacent kin selection arguments) absolutely is the most plausible argument for why the human species evolved to behave in an apparently altruistic^[1] manner and value it in others in the first place, long before we started on abstract value systems like utilitarianism, and in many cases people still value or practice some behaviours that appear altruistic despite indifference to or active disavowal of utilitarian or deontological arguments for improving others' welfare.

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   there's an entire literature on "reciprocal altruism"

I think there's plenty of place for argument in moral reflection, but part of that argument includes accepting that things aren't necessarily "obvious" or "irrefutable" because they're intuitively appealing. Personally I think the drowning child experiment is pretty useful as thought experiments go, but human morality in practice is so complicated that even Peter Singer doesn't act consistently with it, and I don't think it's because he doesn't care.

If being thoughtful, sincere and selfless is a core value, it seems like it would be more of a problem if influential people in the community felt they had to embrace the label even if they didn't think it was valuable or accurate

I suspect a lot of the 'EA adjacent' description comes from question marks about particular characteristics EA stances or image rather than doubting some of their friends could benefit from participating in the community, and that part of that is less a rejection of EA altogether and more an acknowledgement they often find themselves at least as closely aligned with people doing great work outside the community.

(Fwiw I technically fit into the "adjacent" bracket from the other side: never been significantly active in the community, like some of its ideas and values - many of which I believed in before 'EA' was a thing - and don't identify with or disagree with other ideas commonly associated with EA, so it wouldn't really make much sense to call myself an EA)

I think you raise an important point: people legitimately have different opinions on what the scale should mean, and there might also be cultural factors that skew how people perceive they should respond on aggregate. If there is such a thing as a true hedonic scale for how people actually feel about their life that can be compared from person to person, survey data isn't an ideal proxy for it.

But I don't think the average person responding assumes the valence symmetry that you probably assume. Most people do want to go on living and so it's not unreasonable to assume that the bottom half of the scale which goes all the way up to the "best possible life" isn't supposed to represent different degrees of unbearable torture. I imagine most of the large fraction of the world's population who awarded themselves a 4/10 on that scale would be utterly horrified by the idea that this might imply their life wasn't worth living.

Yep. A significant portion of the relevant health economics literature Givewell researchers will be familiar with uses measures which do treat lives as non-equal, typically the "value of a statistical life" which represents how much society is willing to pay to save that life which is broadly proportional to GDP per capita. The rationale is basically that survivors in richer societies are capable of generating enough wealth to cover the costs of their treatment, but if you're valuing lives from an altruistic perspective then you really, really don't want to weight it based on future ability to pay...

That "value of a statistical life" obviously factors in differences in opportunities and values positive externalities generated from surviving, but vastly overweights differences in actual quality of life - and even on value-of-a-statistical-life grounds malaria nets and vitamin supplementation in Sub Saharan Africa is generally still seen as cost effective.^[1] From a pure hedonic utilitarian perspective you might want to use some sort of subjective wellbeing factor instead.  Multiply that by the expected future life of the person saved and you get the WELLBY as an alternative metric ^[2] 

But the difference in average self-reported subjective wellbeing on a linear scale is... really not very big compared with the differences in costs between countries, and probably isn't going to change their recommendations very much. Taking the example of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Congoese people polled do indeed value their happiness at lower than many other countries on the World Happiness Poll's nominally linear scale at only 3.3 out of 10. But India and Bangladesh, highlighted in the post as countries which don't have ongoing conflict and plausibly have better economic opportunities, score only 4.1 and 3.8 respectively so factoring in the weightings of subjective wellbeing - if you believe them to be accurate - would change very little. (The main reason why comparatively few nets are dispensed in India and Bangladesh is that the local malaria variety is a lot less prevalent and a lot less lethal. The life expectancy difference to Congo shrinks if you factor out malaria too...). And if children survive infancy, their lives are typically lived over spans of 60-70 years. It's unlikely the global distribution of happiness will be identical 30 years from now, and entirely possible that the countries with the lowest happiness will see the biggest improvement

So whilst GiveWell may have made the judgement to weight lives equally on ideological grounds, the actual data you'd need to create a robust argument for doing things differently tends to not be there or broadly inclined to what they're already doing...

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   people in richer countries not only face proportionally higher healthcare costs in general, but also diminishing returns since the treatments they're at risk of missing out on tend to be expensive and complex surgery and new experimental drugs, rather than vitamins and nets...

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   using national life expectancy figures which are significantly affected by malaria prevalence in infants as weights which discourage supplying malaria nets is questionable, but in theory life expectancy measures could be adjusted to factor malaria out....

I don't think that it's the possibility that Stöcker might have only allowed people of certain immigration status to take it or the possibility of differential impact on people that like or dislike his politics that huw was drawing attention to.^[1] Rather it's the point that medically qualified people with some interesting views have conducted some incredibly ugly experiments in the past, particularly in Germany, which is one of the reasons why you don't get to run unlicensed medical experiments on the general public just because you're a doctor.

From the limited coverage I've seen haven't seen any reason to believe that the decision to try to stop Stöcker to offer a vaccination claimed to be a COVID cure whilst its efficacy was essentially untested had anything to do with his politics (and if it did, I think the direction of causality is more individual becomes increasingly politically radical => individual being less willing to cooperate with bureaucrats than the other way round). I don't think there's been any serious suggestion that he actually intended to harm people, con people or exclude migrants from receiving the vaccine. But improperly prepared or ineffective vaccines delivered in good faith can potentially cause a lot of harm too.^[2]

It may be the case that German bureaucracy is particularly inflexible (it does have that reputation!) ^[3]but there is a happy medium between considering potential positive impact of shortening standard approval processes^[4] and not letting someone bypass regulations to inject people with a solution claimed to be a pandemic cure because they have relevant qualifications and claim to have validated it's safe and works on five people. 

Yes, the COVID pandemic was an exceptional circumstance, but even or perhaps especially with COVID there are plenty of plausible circumstances where skipping the approval process results in more deaths than approval delays, including circumstances where the substance is harmless but ineffective but leads to behavioural change due to false beliefs about immunity.

Ultimately Stöcker is extremely well qualified, but so are a non-zero number of the quack cure promoters (for the record, I've also read a credible, critical source suggest his vaccine is plausibly effective, fairly unlikely to be harmful and not dissimilar to the approved Novavax COVID vaccine in approach so it's probably unfair to put him in the "quack" bracket. But I think it's fair to say that if his essentially untested approach to preventing COVID symptoms did actually work in the general population, it's the exception amongst untested "COVID cures"). And the RCTing a parachute analogy isn't appropriate here, because the "cure" plausibly leads to more deaths than the problem. So even the most streamlined drug approval process isn't going to look like letting doctors say or do what they want in a pandemic if they have a vaguely plausible method and let natural selection sort out whether they're right.

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   afaik Stöcker made no attempt to qualify who did and didn't receive his vaccine and no matter how strongly he might feel about the topic of immigration, I'm sure he's aware that vaccinating immigrants benefits German citizens too...

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   If you Google "Lubeck vaccine" you'll see fewer references to Stöcker and more to a grisly story from many years earlier about how a contaminated batch of the otherwise notably safe and effective BCG immunization killed over a quarter of babies injected with it. 

3. ^{^}

   It also has one of the world's biggest pharmaceutical industries, so the problem isn't insurmountable...

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   Something which itself wasn't uncontroversial, both amongst actual professionals and politically motivated promoters of vaccine hesitancy.

That's going to be difficult to untangle, because improvements to some aspects like educational opportunities and shifts in generational attitudes take time to pay dividends and the causality plausibly runs both ways. Half the population is offered direct wellbeing improvements and the overall economic impact of education increased workforce participation is generally positive, but also countries most successful in tackling gender inequality tend to be ones that have already experienced positive trends in their development. 

And also, of course, because there are a lot of different measures of gender equality and human wellbeing.

Countries which already have higher gender equality tend to do a lot better in HDI indicators and somewhat better in subjective wellbeing indicators, but there are obviously many other factors at play.