Talk:Effective altruism/GA2

GA Review
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Reviewer: Mujinga (talk · contribs) 17:34, 30 March 2022 (UTC)

Review

 * I'll take this on for review, I'll start my comments today and see how far I'll get Mujinga (talk) 17:34, 30 March 2022 (UTC)
 * Exciting! Thank you :D Ruthgrace (talk) 17:52, 30 March 2022 (UTC)




 * First off, I'm quite confused by the talk page, since normally the newest discussions are at the bottom of the page, although it's cool to see lots of discussion on how to improve the page since Talk:Effective altruism/GA1
 * Earwig gives some high hits, mostly quotes but there's a bit of closeparaphrasing in "Cause priorities"
 * Article is stable

Lead

 * This will need some work, I'll come back to it last [quickfailed so didn't do this]
 * At 46k prose size there should be three or four whole paragraphs summarizing the article, per MOS:LEADLENGTH

Practice

 * I'll have more of a handle on this after reading the whole article, but this isn't how I would imagine the article would begin. Right now this first paragraph feels like an advert for Deworm the World, whereas I would be expecting mention of who first came up with the idea and an introduction to the themes of donation and career, to be expanded below

Donation

 * "who had become wealthy through Facebook" - you mean by investing in Fbook?
 * " estimates that effective altruism has roughly $46 billion committed to effective charities" - well the source says "How much funding is committed to effective altruism (going forward)? Around $46 billion." It doesn't say it's in charities. Further, the article has more stats that might be worth adding

Career choice

 * Link The Most Good You Can Do on first mention and not later

Entrepreneurship

 * Only one sentence of explanation before going into examples

Cause priorities

 * There's some close paraphrasing here with International Encyclopedia of Ethics. We have: Examples of causes include providing food for those with food insecurity, protecting endangered species, mitigating climate change, reforming immigration policy, researching cures for illnesses, preventing sexual violence, alleviating poverty, eliminating factory farming, or averting nuclear warfare. and it has" They include, for example, feeding the hungry, protecting endangered species, mitigating climate change, reforming immigration policy, researching cures for illnesses, preventing sexual violence, aiding those in extreme poverty, eliminating factory farming, averting nuclear war.

Global health and development

 * "direct unconditional cash transfers" what does unconditional mean here?
 * this section could be pulled together into two paragrpahs

Animal welfare

 * " total suffering could be reduced more easily" - who is arguing this
 * Other animal initiatives affiliated with effective altruism include Animal Ethics' and Wild Animal Initiative's work on wild animal suffering,[73][74] addressing farm animal suffering with cultured meat,[75][76] and expanding the circle of concern so that people care more about all kinds of animals.[77][78][38] - does this sentence really need seven citations?

Long-term future and global catastrophic risks

 * The Ord quote should be a blockquote per MOS:BQ but also you could trim it

Philosophy

 * "and most reason to benefit them as much as possible" - who said this
 * "how to approach hard questions" - who said this
 * This could be pulled into two paragraphs

Impartiality

 * only link Peter Singer on first mention (as well as lead and image captions)
 * I'm getting a bit lost here to be honest, I'll come back to this in a genera comment

Obstacles

 * Not sure if this needs its own (sub)section
 * "Sociological research" - one paper or a school of thought?

Cause prioritization

 * importance, tractability, and neglectedness. Importance is the amount of value that would be created if a problem were solved, and tractability is the fraction of a problem that would be solved if additional resources were devoted to it. These three criteria - only two of the three were defined

Cost-effectiveness

 * The article is not reading very well to me I'm afraid, we seem to be veering from topic to topic without signposting

Room for more funding

 * unneeded header

Anti-capitalist and institutional critiques

 * These critiques should be in their own third level section, they are a vital part of the article
 * lots of names mentioned without saying who they are or where they are writing

Counterfactual reasoning

 * What a bizarre paragraph to have its own section.

History

 * I would expect at least some of the information here at the beginning of the article, not at the end

Overall comments

 * Having had a close read of this article, there are I think structural issues here. I would expect an article on effective altruism to begin by saying where the name came from, when it was first proposed, who proposed it, what books/articles are seminal and so on. Compare for example our articles on Existentialism or (better perhaps) Accelerationism. Instead we start with a paragraph focused mainly on Deworm the World. The article does a good job of giving examples of groups/people engaging in effective altruism but unfortunately could do a lot better in explaining what it is.


 * The structure of the article is not working for me. We need signposting and by the time we got into the philosophy it's like we enter a different article. And then within philosophy we get to a section which is a single paragraph on counterfactual reasoning which just seems bizarre to me. The history should prob be at the beginning and then a clearer, signposted structure is needed as at Accelerationism. I guess I would like something along the lines of 1 what is it 2 philosophical underpinnings 3 themes and realworld examples 4 criticisms


 * Yew-Kwang Ng and Derek Parfit are both mentioned in the nav box as "key figures" but they aren't in the article. Severla works mentioned as key aren't in the article.


 * The prose could be improved as there are quite a lot of single sentence paragraphs


 * Overall I'm going to quickfail this now since the article in its current state does not meet 1 and 3 of the good article criteria and I find it hard to imagine these problems could be fixed in a week. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, I'd be happy to clarify if anything is not clear but I think this will take some work before becoming a good article. I was going to suggest consulting WikiProject Philosophy then I saw there is actually WikiProject Effective Altruism as well. Mujinga (talk) 19:16, 30 March 2022 (UTC)