Since the groups above seem to exhaust the space of beneficiaries (if what we care about is well-being), we can’t expect to get more effectiveness improvements in this way. In future, such improvements will have to come from finding new interventions, or intervention types.
Though I think the conclusion may well be correct, this argument doesn’t seem valid to me. Thinking about it more produced some ideas I found interesting.
Imagine that we instead had only one group of beneficiaries: all conscious beings. We could run the same argument—this group exhausts all possible beneficiaries, etc. -- and conclude that discovering new beneficiary groups isn’t helpful. However, breaking down “conscious beings” into present and future groups, and breaking down further into humans and animals, has in fact been very helpful, so we would have been wrong to stop looking for beneficiary groups.
From where we stand now, I can imagine discovering more useful beneficiary groups by breaking down the three you highlight further. Arguably, this is what happened with people in extreme poverty: they are a very help-able subgroup. Similarly, factory-farmed animals seem to be a very help-able subgroup of non-human animals, and maybe chickens are the most-help-able. Maybe the discovery of more very help-able subgroups, e.g. subgroups of future conscious beings (artificial beings? future animals?) or subgroups of wild animals (species that suffer a lot in the wild?), will lead to big EA breakthroughs in the future.
Of course, which groups are help-able basically depends on the interventions available, so splitting EA research into “find new beneficiary groups” and “find new interventions” is a blurry distinction.
Though I think the conclusion may well be correct, this argument doesn’t seem valid to me. Thinking about it more produced some ideas I found interesting.
Imagine that we instead had only one group of beneficiaries: all conscious beings. We could run the same argument—this group exhausts all possible beneficiaries, etc. -- and conclude that discovering new beneficiary groups isn’t helpful. However, breaking down “conscious beings” into present and future groups, and breaking down further into humans and animals, has in fact been very helpful, so we would have been wrong to stop looking for beneficiary groups.
From where we stand now, I can imagine discovering more useful beneficiary groups by breaking down the three you highlight further. Arguably, this is what happened with people in extreme poverty: they are a very help-able subgroup. Similarly, factory-farmed animals seem to be a very help-able subgroup of non-human animals, and maybe chickens are the most-help-able. Maybe the discovery of more very help-able subgroups, e.g. subgroups of future conscious beings (artificial beings? future animals?) or subgroups of wild animals (species that suffer a lot in the wild?), will lead to big EA breakthroughs in the future.
Of course, which groups are help-able basically depends on the interventions available, so splitting EA research into “find new beneficiary groups” and “find new interventions” is a blurry distinction.
You ended up pretty substantially impacting the follow-up.
That’s great, thanks for letting me know! Score one for posting on fora :)
Good point, thanks Daniel!