Here’s a very simple model of how society often fails to solve big problems:
Basically everyone would like the world to be better in obvious ways, like fewer people dying early or living in poverty. But it’s very easy to get caught up in our own lives and problems.
Sticking your neck out to say that something is badly wrong costs you something, and actually trying to fix it costs a lot more.
So a lot of ongoing simple and obvious catastrophes go unaddressed, like deadly diseases in poor countries that can be easily prevented with cheap vitamin supplements, or the treatment of animals on factory farms, or the possibility that highly intelligent, capable machines could be uniquely dangerous, because they’re far away, or weird, or hard to fix from scratch, or because nobody gets much credit for working on them.
A lot of our sense of what we should work on, what’s most worthy of good hardworking people, comes from what the people around us admire and notice, which I talk about a lot in my last post on EA. That works fine for lots of big problems, but it also means urgent, terrible problems far away or outside the view of our normal social communities tend to lose out to much smaller ones close to home.
Effective altruism (EA) is basically an attempt to push back against this. It’s a cluster of ideas oriented around using our best evidence and careful reasoning to find the biggest problems that the rest of the world is neglecting and figure out how to actually help in the most quantifiably good way, plus the loose network of people trying to act on them. (If you’ve heard of it lately, it was probably as an insult in a political fight over AI).
Here’s the short version of the EA I’d like to defend:
We should take the world’s worst problems seriously, even when they’re far away or strange or unpopular. It is terrible that hundreds of millions of people live in extreme poverty, factory farming is a clear ethical disaster, and the threat that we might lose control of society to AI systems vastly smarter than us needs to be taken more seriously. There are strong moral reasons to devote significant resources (money, time, organizing) to solving these problems, including at some personal cost.
We ought to use numbers and explicit cost-benefit analysis where they work… Giving $10,000 to one charity means not giving it to another, so it’s important to compare charities that do similar things. Charities that provide anti-malarial bed nets save more lives per dollar than many other global health charities. Simply counting lives respects people’s basic dignity and freedom, because their personal choices or values don’t come into the equation for whether they deserve help.
… but pluralism and respect for other people as free agents are foundational starting points we can’t override. We should among other things reject confident exchange rates between cause areas. We all live surrounded by free people with wildly different moral views, and society works because each of us makes compromises in our own ethics so that everyone can pursue their own vision of the good life. A totalizing utilitarianism ignores this background compromise. A corollary is that choosing which causes to prioritize can’t be reduced to utilitarian math.
We should have a strong presumption toward helping others in ways they’re free to turn down (like bed nets, vitamins, and unconditional cash transfers). Utilitarian comparison works best as a way of choosing between interventions that expand people’s freedom and dignity, including their capacity for self-determination. We should also have a strong presumption against biting the bullet of any ethical system that would override people’s decisions about the course of their lives.
Ordinary rules about honesty, money, power, and personal/professional boundaries still apply, no matter our perceived ability to rationally analyze our choices. Society’s rules are often good in themselves, and people are too fallible and too swayed by their social scenes and status to safely reason their way past them. No one should feel obligated to justify longstanding social rules and conventions around basic decency from first principles. They often exist for reasons much deeper than we can immediately grasp using reason.
EA works best as a cluster of ideas and a loose professional network (a lot like the YIMBY movement) rather than a “community.” When one set of beliefs decides your job, funding, housing and friends, changing your mind or speaking up gets far too costly.
Part of the reason this cluster is so important to me is that it still often works magic and feels like one of the most intellectually vibrant and fruitful scenes in the world. Our work on factory farming is a good example of the good aspects of EA at its best. Taking it seriously is unpopular (many people don’t know how bad it is, or wave away the idea that animals can feel pain) and inconvenient (nobody wants to give up cheap meat), and EA treats it as one of the biggest problems in the world anyway.
Other things EA has managed to do:
It has prevented a major war’s worth of deaths, mostly from malaria (GiveWell, a charity evaluator, estimates that the donations it has directed have saved more than 340,000 lives).
It helped push the share of American egg-laying hens that are cage-free from under one in ten in 2015 to almost half today.
It started building a whole professional field around the potentially massive risks from advanced AI most of a decade before ChatGPT came out. Some EA thinking about AI from years ago still feels shockingly fresh and relevant.
Because of its track record, and how compelling the EA intellectual scene has been, I’ve been publicly associated with and representing effective altruism for the past 5 years, and was a longtime follower of EA debates and ideas in the 10 years before that. It’s shaped my thinking in the same way my other core political and philosophical beliefs have.
Of course, effective altruist ideas have also led to a lot of harm. Sam Bankman-Fried, a major donor who linked himself closely to EA, defrauded depositors of billions of dollars. EA spaces have sometimes tended toward social and intellectual insularity. EA has taken a lot of criticism over the last few years, and while some of it has been in bad faith, some of it has been completely fair.
The same source of EA’s biggest successes is also the source of its biggest risks: if you step outside what the people around you take for granted, that is both how you identify gigantic, obvious problems no one else is working on, but it’s also how people convince themselves that the normal rules don’t apply to them anymore and how they become intellectually insular and isolated. The principles above are the version of EA I’m excited to defend, one that preserves the first and aims to be much better at avoiding the second. This view is rooted in my specific view of ethics and politics, that differs from totalizing utilitarianism, places much more emphasis on human choice and freedom, but still takes many of the trade-offs and choices EA pushes us to consider deeply seriously.
What I’m describing is somewhere between my favorite version of EA as it already exists and a new clear direction I’d like it to move in, learning from its successes and failures so far, and my views on both the value and limits of utilitarian thinking and comparisons. Plenty of people in EA already live by this version, and I’d like it to be easier to point to. This post is meant to plant a basic flag for my high-level principles. I’ve articulated my basic case for EA in much more detail in my last post on it. In future posts I’ll explore in much more detail how I think about EA, what I love about it, the specific version I want to represent, and where I’d like us to reform and change.
Clear thinking king 👑
I'm here for anyone who takes suffering seriously, instead of falling back to "My Expected Value Is Bigger Than Yours."