EA's Are Sufficiently Policy Pessimistic?

There's a long school of what I call policy pessimism which observes that this is this Rossie's iron law of curiosity the sociologist. The expected value of any such science of any social policy intervention is zero and it's really hard to get past that we're much better at policy evaluation than we were when Rossie was like a force in the 1970s and 80s. Still the expected value of most interventions is zero so I guess I'm slowly convincing you from one criticism EA to a separate longer standing criticism of all policy evaluation in general, he says.