SummaryGiven EA's history and values, I’d have expected for impact evaluation to be a distinguishing feature of the movement. In fact, impact evaluation seems fairly rare in the EA space.There are some things specific actors could do for EA to get more of the benefits of impact evaluation. For example, organisations that don’t already could carry out evaluations of their impact, and a well-suited individual could start an organisation to carry out impact evaluations and analysis of the EA movement.Overall I’m unsure to what extent more focus on impact evaluation would be an improvement. On the one hand, establishing impact is challenging for many EA activities and impact evaluation can be burdensome. On the other hand, an organisation's historic impact seems very action-relevant to its future activities and current levels of impact evaluation seem low.What Is Impact Evaluation?Over the last year I’ve been speaking to EA orgs about their impact [...] ---Outline:(00:59) What Is Impact Evaluation?(01:22) Why is Impact Evaluation Important?(02:17) I’d expect Impact Evaluation to be quite common in EA(03:00) Impact evaluation is fairly rare in EA(04:42) Potentially justified reasons for this(05:58) Some low- to medium-cost opportunities(08:11) ConclusionThe original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. ---
First published:
October 26th, 2023

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hDNpHEA2Kn4xBoS8r/impact-evaluation-in-ea
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.