Effective altruism and common sense

Thomas Sowell once called Milton Friedman “one of those rare thinkers who had both genius and common sense”.

I am not here interested in Sowell’s claim about Friedman, but rather in his insight into the tension between abstract smarts and common sense, and particularly how it applies to the effective altruism community. For it seems to me that there sometimes is an unbalanced ratio of clever abstractions to common sense in EA discussions.

To be clear, my point is not that abstract ideas are...