EA - An update and personal reflections about AidGrade by Eva

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: An update and personal reflections about AidGrade, published by Eva on December 27, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.(Loosely adapted from a post on my personal blog.)As some of you know, back in 2012 I set up AidGrade, a small non-profit research institute, to collect the results of impact evaluations and synthesize them. It was actually while working on AidGrade that I learned about the Effective Altruism community, as someone who I was interacting with about AidGrade asked me if I'd heard of it.Fast-forward 11 years. A global consortium of institutions, led by the World Bank, is going to be working on an open repository of impact evaluation results that could be used for meta-analysis and policy (the Impact Data and Evidence Aggregation Library, or IDEAL). This is really close to AidGrade's mission, and we will be participating in the consortium, helping to design the protocols, contribute data, and perform cross-checks with the other institutions.I am thrilled to see something like IDEAL develop. We made a case that this was a thing that should exist, and over time enough other people agreed that it will soon be a much larger thing (in which AidGrade will play the smallest of roles). All along, I was hoping that there could be a better institutional home for such a repository, and here we are. It's the best possible outcome.To anyone who supported AidGrade, through either time or money over the years, I hope you feel pleased with what you helped accomplish with AidGrade, and I hope you are as excited as I am about IDEAL.With regards to institutional change more broadly, I also have some good news about another venture, the Social Science Prediction Platform. This platform enables researchers to gather forecasts of what their studies will find. The Journal of Development Economics has recently started encouraging authors of papers accepted through their pre-results review ("Registered Report") track to collect forecasts on the SSPP, which should accelerate the use of forecasts in academia. We have been having discussions with other organizations about collecting forecasts and I hope to have more good news to share soon.Both these projects were deeply rooted in academic work. I might be biased, but I think academic work is often underrated. It can be useful for many reasons, but part of it surely is that it can change the way people think about a topic and enable institutional change.Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org