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https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-anti-politics

[This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It\u2019s not by me - it\u2019s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I\u2019ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you\u2019ve read them all, I\u2019ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked - SA]

Everyone familiar with Effective Altruism knows that \u201cgood intentions aren\u2019t enough.\u201d

If you want your charitable giving to mean something, you also need to measure your favorite program\u2019s effects with good statistical data.

But we don\u2019t always clarify that good intentions and accurate data still aren\u2019t enough. You also need to know that you\u2019ve collected the right data and asked the right questions, and these are both much, much harder than the introductory effective altruist material tends to let on.

I first picked up James Ferguson\u2019s The Anti-Politics Machine a year ago, expecting to read about a failed development project that could have benefited from an evidence-based approach. But instead I found an intervention that could have been backed by every experiment in the world and still would have fallen apart, a program so profoundly shaped by the lens of \u201cdevelopment economics\u201d that its practitioners misinterpreted almost every facet of what they were doing.