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multifoliaterose comments on Efficient Charity - Less Wrong
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Their track record is so much more amazing than anybody else's that it seems like a good idea to support them even if nobody in the world knows why.
I doubt we'll know why CPC is so good at it. We still haven't figured out why Industrial Revolution happened by more or less sudden take-off, or why demographic transition happened, or why Flynn Effect happened, or why Neolithic transition happened nearly simultaneously in so many places after such a long time of not happening, or why language and intelligence took so long to evolve. Yes, there's plenty of theories for all of these, but as far as I can tell they're all total garbage with no predictive power. Our knowledge of causes of such processes that happened only once or a few times is nearly non-existent.
My idea is - why not just follow the track record, wherever it takes us? And right now, there's a very clear winner. Does it matter that we don't know why?
I like and upvoted this comment, and agree with most of the points that you make therein but feel that it does not support your (implicit) suggestion that donating to the CPC is one of the best uses of charitable funds.
Again, you have not address NancyLebovitz's questions. If we don't have a model for how the CPC is promoting poverty reduction by economic development then we can't conclude that donating to the CPC is likely to promote economic development.
Now, it could be that according to a reasonable Bayesian prior the expected value of donating to the CPC is sufficiently high so that it would be a good charitable investment, but my knowledge of the situation is too poor for me to be convinced; I'd need to hear more about your implicit reasoning (your thinking about unintended negative consequences, unintended positive consequences, counterfactuals) to understand where you're coming from.