Why not? If you can't quantify an line of action easily then it's out as a candidate for effective altruism, which removes a very large set of possible causes, most of them in fact. And there is no reason to think that the currently quantifiable causes are the most effective.
If you can't quantify an line of action easily then it's out as a candidate for effective altruism
If effective altruism only allowed working on things that were easily quantified then GiveWell, 80000 Hours, and GivingWhatWeCan would all be unfunded and unstaffed. Most of the benefit of those organizations is unclear and very hard to measure, but there are rough reasons to think that they're very important. Effective altruism is about doing as much good as possible with the resources you have, all things considered. Lines of action that are hard to ev...
http://mentalfloss.com/article/54853/our-interview-jeopardy-champion-arthur-chu
I'm not sure I've ever seen such a compelling "rationality success story". There's so much that's right here.
The part that really grabs me about this is that there's no indication that his success has depended on "natural" skill or talent. And none of the strategies he's using are from novel research. He just studied the "literature" and took the results seriously. He didn't arbitrarily deviate from the known best practice based on aesthetics or intuition. And he kept a simple, single-minded focus on his goal. No lost purposes here --- just win as much money as possible, bank the winnings, and use it to self-insure. It's rationality-as-winning, plain and simple.