For several years now GiveWell has been writing up thoughts on the evidence behind particular charities and programs, but haven’t written a great deal about the general principles they follow in distinguishing between strong and weak evidence. This post:
- Lays out the general properties that they think make for strong evidence: relevant reported effects, attribution, representativeness, and consonance with other observations.
- Discusses how these properties apply to several common kinds of evidence: anecdotes, awards/recognition/reputation, “micro” data and “macro” data.