Error

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.

I do think that our tendency to understand “helping people who currently exist” as “helping people in extreme poverty” probably neglects some other effective causes in that area. Some of Open Phil’s work I see this way—for example, the possibility that US criminal justice policy is so bonkers that in the right circumstances, we could create lots of good for current people through political change on that front. If EA Policy Analytics ends up having success, I would put them in this category, too.

Some of the most significant insights of effective altruism in terms of finding more effective ways to help others have come from highlighting different beneficiary groups.

This makes me want to split off “people in extreme poverty” into a distinct group of beneficiaries—I suspect that for many the “aha!” moment in their EA journey was realizing that these people exist and can be helped. Also, it seems to me that the interventions available for helping people in extreme poverty are quite different from interventions that help richer people; AMF won’t help richer people much, and direct cash transfers help richer people less. However, this would complicate the three-way split that you highlight here.

I found this very illuminating, thanks!

Nitpick: You say “There are altruistic activities which fall outside this grouping – for example, working to improve biodiversity for its own sake. But these don’t improve anyone’s well-being, and so fall outside the scope of effective altruism,” but I thought EA was defined more broadly than that. My understanding of EA is that if you really think that e.g. preserving biodiversity for its own sake is more worthwhile than the other causes then that’s fine, EA can help you find the most effective way to do that. I would have said that the reason why non-well-being-improving causes aren’t part of the EA Big Three is because very few people think those causes are more urgent than well-being-improving causes in the first place. Thoughts?

This is a great article, Michelle! Looking forward very much to the follow-up.

there might research being done into ways to increase animal’s well-being set-point

Anyone up for working on CRISPR-based gene drives to this end?

Nice overview but the decision making process for choosing a cause isn’t (or shouldn’ be) axiomatic and arbitrary based on choosing who should benefit, but rather it should depend on various estimates and calculations about the value derived from various efforts. To say that we’d support a cause merely because we support the people it helps is a bit of a simplification.

Bostrom has pointed out that X-risk could well be the best cause area for helping extant persons as well: http://​​www.nickbostrom.com/​​astronomical/​​waste.html

Really interesting piece! It helps to frame things in the “beneficiaries” category, thanks very much for that framing!

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. These are harder to find, and likely to lead to fewer orders of magnitude improvement.

This was one part I’m confused about. May it not be the case that new intervention types will be highly effective in the future?

For example, one intervention type I can think of it to get other people who are currently non-EAs to care more about addressing the needs of the three beneficiary groups. It seems that such an intervention, if effective and broad enough, may be a high magnitude improvement.