What We Learned from Red Teaming Our Top Charities
givewell.org
givewell.org
> We dedicated a team of ~5 research staff to work full-time for 2 weeks for each top charity.
> The majority of this dedicated team did not have significant experience investigating these areas, giving them the advantage of a relatively unbiased starting point.
> An additional 5-7 researchers with more expertise in these areas of our research provided support by answering questions and assessing the red team’s arguments.
So there was no red teaming. It was instead an independent analysis of the assumptions, actions and processes of the charities in question.
Givewell, being EAish, is generally staffed by people steeped in ratadj and/or nerd culture, so that seeming like a natural way of describing it to them seems unsurprising.
I mean, I do see your point, and "getting grumpy about such things" is very definitely not an experience I'm personally unfamiliar with, but in context I can't quite bring myself to be annoyed about this specific instance :D
Too used to kicking around with people where it's a basically standard term (not always one used *positively* depending on which group of people, but I forgot it's not always clear).
Genuinely nice to know EA circles are involving/including people who aren't already sufficiently steeped in the origin/history/context/whatever of the movement to find jargon like 'ratadj' as obvious as I thought it was when I originally typed it.
(and it was jargon and I've just edited this comment because my original phrasing almost certainly read as condescending in a way that was absolutely not why I was meaning to say; mea culpa and my apologies to anybody who read the first version)
This does quite seriously strike me as an excellent sign for its sustainability and while, yes, EA has a whole buuunch of weirdness to/around it, I'm unconvinced you could've got a first generation of something like EA without being tolerant of the people who brought the weirdness, so:
Cool!
But granted your typical charity has no idea of what the jargon is in the security (or even broader technical) field, and so "red teaming" is a vague enough phrase that could mean anything.
To be fair, what they're doing is good. Just that the wording is a little extravagant.
In half a generation, audit will be relabelled re-teaming. It's ironic.
E.g.: "legitimately", and "literally".
Successfully correcting them on "I" vs "me" vs "myself" is now just a distant fantasy.
Sigh.
But this? Really? Can't imagine what the heck might make it flagworthy other than the people who didn't know the origin of Red Team and polluted the comments.