What are some examples of things that could have been popular EA causes, but weren’t, for reasons that are not completely obvious (and may have to do with historical contingency)?
One example I can think of is anti-aging. This is a cause that has a lot of traction in circles that have overlap with EA circles (rationalist, transhumanist, singularitarian, etc.). However, for whatever reason, it hasn’t been identified with EA. If you think anti-aging sounds too outlandish, it’s worth noting that with the exception of poverty reduction, the current popular EA cause categories (AI/ex-risk reduction and veganism/animal activism) both seem outlandish.
Another area where EA focus hasn’t historically been great, but is gradually increasing, is changing or working around bad policy, in areas such as migration, drug policy, international trade, etc. Lots of economist-types are attracted to EA, so it’s interesting that the policy arena has been relatively neglected until recently.
Katja Grace (of Meteuphoric) also did some research for Giving What We Can looking into climate change charities. She wrote up her findings as a blog post.
I think the lack of EA work on bad policy comes largely from the heavy competition in the area. To an extent, improving policy is zero-sum in that there are lots of people who are actively working against any particular policy (some good policies receive minimal opposition, but there probably aren’t many of these). Whereas if you, say, donate money to AMF, few people will try to stop you. Even those who disagree with your decision won’t actually prevent you from giving the money and won’t prevent AMF from distributing the bednets.
At the 2014 Effective Altruism Summit, each of Geoff Anders, Peter Thiel, and Holden Karnofsky identified three heuristic criteria for effective altruists to use in selecting a cause area:
neglected
valuable
tractable
I. Why Does Effective Altruism Neglect Ant-Aging?
Anti-aging doesn’t seem very tractable on its face, but neither does existential risk reduction. Despite both being causes within emphasized by rationalists and transhumanists, anti-aging has been left outside of effective altruism thus far. I believe this is because the rationalist community as a precursor to effective altruism better coordinated their concern over existential risk better than their concern over anti-aging efforts.
Like, through Less Wrong, and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, (almost) every existential risk reduction organization got in touch with another. This formed a solid voice advocating for this cause when effective altruism started. On the other hand, Aubrey de Grey and his organization, SENS, seem like the only one(s) in contact with effective altruism, while the rest of the major anti-aging advocates run their organizations out of touch with us, and each other.
Another thing about ant-aging is that while it on its own may seem like a worthy intervention, it often gets lumped with cryonics, and other transhumanist technologies, that seem even less tractable than anti-aging research. That is, those aspects are frequently dismissed by rationalist, let alone effective altruists. So, if the most vocal advocates for anti-aging research only communicate that signal with a bunch of noise, effective altruists may be less likely to consider it.
This seems like a historical contingency to me, based on how the rationalist community organized itself with some circles but not others. This makes possible but by no means definite that the rationalist community has not emphasized anti-aging enough within effective altruism, relative to existential risk reduction.
II. Why Does Effective Altruism Neglect (Better) Policy Advocacy?
This also seems to be due in part to historical contingency. First of all, there is the wariness among the rationalist community that delving into the trenches of politics will be much less tractable than aiding the world through other means. I believe I mildly perceive the same strain of thinking as an undercurrent of utilitarians such as Toby Ord, or Peter Singer.
Also, Givewell thought it much more difficult to assess policy advocacy when measuring impact qualifications for it was much more difficult. In other words, Givewell wanted to cut their teeth, and gain experience, in an area more measurable than policy advocacy. Before, like other charity evaluators they were giving recommendations to individual donors. Now, with Good Ventures, they’re giving recommendations for foundations, with much more money.
In conversation with my friend Joey Savoie a few weeks ago, we discussed maybe Givewell is exploring policy advocacy through the Open Philanthropy Project now because noticeable gains in policy change can only be affected with large investments, and it’s only now with Good Ventures that Givewell has an ally with sufficient weight to get that happening.
My opinion was that anti-aging and existential risk seem roughly equally neglected and roughly equally tractable, but existential risk seems a whole lot more valuable, so hence the focus on that instead.
I concur. This explanation works for why precursor movements to effective altruism such as the rationalist community would have emphasized existential risk over anti-ageing research as well.
II. Why Does Effective Altruism Neglect (Better) Policy Advocacy?
I’m not sure that this is necessarily the case among EA orgs with full-time staff. The Centre for Effective Altruism (in particular the Global Priorities Project, which is our collaboration with FHI), The Open Philanthropy Project and the Cambridge Centre on Existential Risk are putting considerable effort into policy work. For example, I and others at CEA put the majority of our time over the past week into policy research, and our trustees were at a meeting at No. 10 Downing Street yesterday. I have written up some of my thoughts on our early policy work at http://effective-altruism.com/ea/7e/good_policy_ideas_that_wont_happen_yet/
I think that there are a few effects going on here which cause policy to appear under-neglected among the community at large...
There is a relatively larger barrier to entry in policy work (compared to e.g. making a donation to a GiveWell recommendation), which means that policy work is often done by people working in this area full-time, or who have past experience in the area. This may be one of the reasons why the community at large isn’t doing more policy analysis. I think it would be useful if the EA community did do more policy analysis, in particular making recommendations of policies that could feasibly happen (i.e. tweak this thing, not ban agriculture subsidies) and doing analyses of the type I outline in my post above (e.g. what are the benefits, what are the costs, who will be in favour, who will be against, how can we change the policy to make it more feasible while retaining most of the benefits, how would we actually make this change, and who do we ultimately need to convince about this to make it happen, etc.). I for one would find this useful in informing the work that I do in this area, and if the ideas are good enough they would likely be taken forwards.
Policy work is often under-publicised unless there are major breakthroughs. In doing this work we are developing ongoing relationships with people, and if we were to publicise these relationships on the internet we could damage them. For this reason we often find it difficult to talk about our policy work extensively in public.
There may also be cultural and path-dependent effects at play here, which people have mentioned above/below and elsewhere, so I won’t go into them in detail.
Effective altruist organizations with full-time staff definitely aren’t neglecting policy advocacy. I meant the broader community at large, in the sense that for the last two years it’s been focusing upon: reducing global poverty and illness; animal advocacy; reducing existential risk.
I think it would be useful if the EA community did do more policy analysis, in particular making recommendations of policies that could feasibly happen[...]I for one would find this useful in informing the work that I do in this area, and if the ideas are good enough they would likely be taken forwards.
At the 2014 Effective Altruism Summit, each of Geoff Anders, Peter Thiel, and Holden Karnofsky identified three heuristic criteria for effective altruists to use in selecting a cause area:
neglected
valuable
tractable
This “three factor model” of cause assessment has been used by 80,000 Hours for a long time (they use the terms ‘crowdedness’, ‘importance’ and ‘tractability’). Do we know where it originated?
I think it originated with GiveWell—they used something like this framework for assessing cause areas, which 80k then based their framework on. It’s possible I’m misremembering this though.
GiveWell has used this “three factor model” as well (they also use the terms ‘crowdedness,’ ‘importance,’ and ‘tractability’). I’m not sure about the dates when either organization started using this model, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if people started using it independently, since it’s rather intuitive.
It makes sense, but I didn’t know about the model before the Effective Altruism Summit. Having it crystallized is great, and everyone should know about it, so I want to write a post about it for this forum.
This comment is a reminder to myself to write it.
If anyone wants to help me write it, or give feedback, please send me a private message.
What are some examples of things that could have been popular EA causes, but weren’t, for reasons that are not completely obvious (and may have to do with historical contingency)?
I’m surprised in some sense that there hasn’t been more discussion about religion (moreso Eastern religions) in EA, and spreading/working with those religions as an EA cause. Also, psychology and spreading ideas for raising the hedonic treadmill of human populations.
Although I think the causes EA landed on are pretty independent of the historic details, since many independent groups came up with the same causes and they fit objective cause-finding heuristics (e.g. targeting large, marginalized populations).
However, for whatever reason, it hasn’t been identified with EA.
Anti-aging has come up several times over the years, and it’s never seemed promising enough to warrant further consideration (Edit: on the scale of the other big EA causes). I’m not really sure where the altruism lies here, since most people don’t see death as inherently bad phenomenon. (Edit: I now see that anti-aging research is also focused on increasing quality-of-life rather than just increasing lifespan, so I see the altruism!)
Lots of economist-types are attracted to EA, so it’s interesting that the policy arena has been relatively neglected until recently.
Policy discussion has been around for a while. I think it’s more-so that we’re now reaching the size where we can more easily affect it, which is a good reason to start discussing it more.
Why Have Effective Altruists Neglected Interfacing With Religion?
What’s great about religion is that it’s full of the altruism, but it’s unknown how religion considers effectiveness. I by no means mean that religions are inherently opposed to effectiveness, or even indifferent to it. Religion has played a fundamental role in institutionalizing the very idea of charity. Religiously oriented charities individually run the gamut from effective to ineffective, and I believe that’s more due to the individual organization rather than the religion in question itself. Indeed, it’s the history of trying new charitable interventions inspired by religion that has given humanity a starting place to think about the effectiveness of altruism in the first place.
Historically, religion has implemented altruism without always thinking in terms of effectiveness, because the body of strategies composing effectiveness as an idea was abstract and unknown. It seems without its frame of mind, effective altruism is unsure how to interface with religion.
Another issue is religions tend to be deontological in nature, and while effective altruism accepts deontologists, it wasn’t designed with deontology as the primary framework in mind. So, bridging the epistemic gap between religion and effective altruism may thus be more difficult.
Anyway, I think we could make open calls to effective altruists who:
are religious
were once religious, and feel effective altruism is congruent with their religiously motivated altruism
have received positive feedback from religious folks.
so effective altruism knows better how to reach out to religion.
I am a committed Christian also committed to the principles of effective altruism. I am very frustrated with the level of apathy in the church, given that we are all called to tithe 10% of our income, like the rest of the population Christians have really lost sight of how rich they are now. I am also frustrated by the focus on differences between religions, and between religion and the non religious, when common values of love and concern for our planet giving how utterly amazing it is we are here should prevail. Altruism is at the heart of Christianity and of course it should be effective. I would be happy to work with other EAs in develop an outreach/link strategy into churches.
My wife is head of fundraising for a charity that is like a mini version of Christian aid—donating to poverty alleviating projects in a Christian context. Making this more effective would be a good place to start.
1 billion Christians should be able to make a real dent in the problems of the world if they focussed less on the coffee rota and more on what our faith actually calls us to do.
That’s great, David, and you’re the sort of person I mentioned above. Extending love, compassion, and understanding is a cornerstone of all altruism. I don’t have anything to add now, but I’ll contact you in the future if I broach this topic again.
You might be interested in this chapter on global poverty, utilitarianism, Christian ethics and Peter Singer that I wrote for a Cambridge University Press volume.
I would love to see some action in this space. I think there is a natural harmony between what is best in Christianity—especially regarding helping the global poor—and effective altruism.
One person to consider speaking with is Charlie Camosy, who has worked with Peter Singer in the past (see info here). A couple other people to consider talking with would be Catriona Mackay and Alex Foster.
David, which sort of material you think could be persuasive to the higher ecclesiastical orders so that their charity was more focused on Givewell recommended charities and similar sort of evidence based, calculation based giving?
How can we get priests to talk about the child in the pond to the faithful, in a scaleable and tractable manner?
Religion also often encourages (or is used to defend) speciesism, and it also leads many people to not believe in x-risk. As such, religious EAs are mostly only relevant to 2⁄3 of the major cause areas of EA. Given that I think global poverty is by far the least important of these cause areas, convincing religious people to care about EA doesn’t seem to have very high value to me.
X-risk and animal welfare are still pretty marginalized across the entire population, not just among the religious—and Christians have a very convenient existing infrastructure for collecting money. It might be that there are other reasons not to worry too much about them (e.g. an unmovable hierarchy that controls where the money goes), but their lack of concern for some (or even most) EA target causes doesn’t seem like it should bear much weight.
I think you overlook the strongest argument for spreading religion, namely that by converting people to the One True Faith, we could save them from eternal damnation. As eternity is a long time and damnation is very bad, this would be extremely high QALYs.
Most EAs think all religions are false, so do not subscribe to this argument. However, I do not think religious EAs can avoid this so easily. If you are a Christian EA you should probably try much harder to convert people to Christianity.
My above comment was reasons why effective altruists have found difficulty in reaching out to religion, even though it’s important because much altruism in the world is religiously motivated. However, I understand your point. If someone’s greatest priority is getting others into Heaven by converting them to their own religion, that may be a confounding factor for getting them to do other things.
However, this isn’t the case for all religious people.
How much a religious adherent is supposed to proselytize varies among sects within religions.
From what I know of major world religions, such as Islam, and Christianity, charity is emphasized as an important virtue to act upon independently of, and in addition to, converting others. The moral imperative for charity in religion tends to extend beyond helping only the less fortunate of one’s own religion.
Humans tend to signal their association with an ideology by committing to the goals set out for its adherents. When the goal seems far away, it’s easy for people to promise to achieve it. When the goal is very nearby, its difficulty becomes more apparent, and more people will shirk it. This is called construal-level theory. If you accept that model, I believe it extend to religious conversion. (Some) religious leaders will call upon their followers to convert the unbelieving, yet everyday those same followers fail to confront their neighbors, friends, families, and colleagues from believing differently. As the world becomes more globally interdependent, lots will realize the value in helping and cooperating with groups of outsiders, and their unfortunate.
Religion blends with other cultural forces in people’s lives to cause a diverse array of how they practice, and that still allows effective altruism for millions of religious folks.
Yes, I basically agree. But I think you have slightly misunderstand my argument. Many religions say both
1) You should convert people
2) You should help people
Obviously not all religions say these (for example Judaism is not very evangelical). My argument isn’t that religious people should proletize because of 2). My argument is that, given religious people’s other beliefs about heaven and hell, they should proletize because that is the most effective way of helping people. Even if their religion included no evangelical commandments, they should try to convert people as the most effective way of loving their neighbors. A secular EA charity might try to persuade people in the less economically developed countries to purify their water; a religious EA charity might try to persuade people in the developing world to say their hail marys.
I’m not really sure where the altruism lies here, since most people don’t see death as inherently bad phenomenon.
What does that mean? Anti-aging medication or technology (if it worked) would generate returns not just to the people who engage in the research, but to many others. In that respect, I don’t see how it’s qualitatively different from trying to prevent or cure malaria, AIDS, or NTDs. (Quantitative differences arise mostly from cost-effectiveness and feasibility).
Anti-aging medication or technology (if it worked) would generate returns not just to the people who engage in the research, but to many others.
I’m not seeing what those returns are other than (i) preventing death, and (ii) improving quality-of-life (which also happens in other medical research). It seems like the value-added is (i), which is why I made my original statement.
I don’t see how it’s qualitatively different from trying to prevent or cure malaria, AIDS, or NTDs. (Quantitative differences arise mostly from cost-effectiveness and feasibility).
So, in a way, curing malaria is anti-aging research. If you extend anti-aging research to any research to prevent illnesses with high mortality, then sure. But why give it a new name then? Is it just a broader term than “disease prevention”?
Anti-aging focuses specifically on extending the “healthspan” of people (starting in the developed world, presumably) past the current point where age-related degenerative diseases start to eat into your QALYs.
It’s different from disease prevention because it operates higher than at the level of individual diseases, hoping to solve the underlying reasons why age is so strongly contributory to those diseases.
Anti-aging also tends to have absurdly high RFMF compared to most disease research, since it’s a “weird” idea that most people don’t like.
It also seems high impact: it would serve as a multiplier for any earlier-in-life health improvements as well as allowing some high-skill people to keep contributing to society (e.g., researchers who have accumulated lots of valuable knowledge and experience).
General anti-aging research is arguably more effective than trying to cure any single disease, because once your body begins to decline due to advanced age, that makes you more susceptible to basically all diseases and injuries. Successful anti-aging treatments would thus act as a general, massive health boost to everyone past a certain age.
When I speak of effectiveness, I generally mean, “For X amount of effort, how much good would this path lead to?” I agree that successfully giving a general, massive health boost would probably be better than curing a single disease, but I worry that the broader approach has less impact-per-effort.
Anti-aging has come up several times over the years, and it’s never seemed promising enough to warrant further consideration.
I discussed estimating the cost-effectiveness of anti-ageing research at the very end of my talk at the Good Done Right conference. There’s actually an error in my formula there, so it should be 20 times less effective than I said. I don’t think we should have deep confidence in the answer coming out, but I do think it’s suggestive enough that it may be worth more careful estimation.
Given it’s history, I’m not surprised that the EA movement is currently primarily non-religious people. But I am surprised that no one has tried talking to/at churches, which could be very useful, if it worked. I would guess that some denominations would be more open to it than others.
The war on environmental degradation has a powerful new ally: Pope Francis. Prompted by a Joint Workshop of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences on sustainability that was convened in May 2014, the Vatican has articulated some of its strongest environmental statements to date, calling for all of us to take personal responsibility and redirect our relationship with nature to ensure the future habitability and sustainability of this planet. The problems that motivate the Vatican are no different from those that concern the scientific community: depletion of nonrenewable resources, loss of ecosystem services, and risks from changing climate. But what the Vatican contributes is the rationale for taking action: because it is our moral responsibility to bequeath a habitable planet to future generations.
argues that engaging religious leaders, rather than relying on politicians, could hold the key to mobilising billions of people around the world to change aspects of their lifestyles to help prevent catastrophic climate change.
I’m surprised in some sense that there hasn’t been more discussion about religion (moreso Eastern religions) in EA, and spreading/working with those religions as an EA cause.
I’m not surprised by that at all. Most EAs are non-religious or at least weakly religious, and spreading religion is a non-intuitive idea for non-religious people. Even for religious people, it doesn’t make much sense to spread other religions.
“Spreading ideas for raising the hedonic treadmill of human populations” seems like part of the Hedonistic Imperative, as espoused by David Pearce.
If so, it seems to me like its an idea leaning towards transhumanism that doesn’t seem tractable in the present, with the requisite technology to achieve such goals coming at some unknown future point (at best), and with lots of people unable to grasp how where we start researching or advocating for such an abstract cause.
I personally have sympathy for its sentiment, but this is just my hypothesis for the conclusion skeptical effective altruists reach.
It seems obvious there hasn’t been (much) discussion of Eastern religions because effective altruism is primarily represented in English-speaking and Western(ized) countries, which are traditionally Abrahamic in religion. I know that Benjamin Todd of 80,000 Hours has personally read much Taoism, and of Chinese culture, so asking him for perspective may prove worthwhile.
A really superb book I have never seen highlighted by EAs is Human Purpose and Transhuman Potential:A Cosmic Vision for Our Future Evolution by Ted Chu, PhD. He has been the chief economist of GM amongst other things so he is very smart and well grounded, and it’s an amazing intellectual feat. I raise it as it covers all of the religious wisdom across all faiths within the book—I found it hugely thought provoking.
What are some examples of things that could have been popular EA causes, but weren’t, for reasons that are not completely obvious (and may have to do with historical contingency)?
One example I can think of is anti-aging. This is a cause that has a lot of traction in circles that have overlap with EA circles (rationalist, transhumanist, singularitarian, etc.). However, for whatever reason, it hasn’t been identified with EA. If you think anti-aging sounds too outlandish, it’s worth noting that with the exception of poverty reduction, the current popular EA cause categories (AI/ex-risk reduction and veganism/animal activism) both seem outlandish.
Another area where EA focus hasn’t historically been great, but is gradually increasing, is changing or working around bad policy, in areas such as migration, drug policy, international trade, etc. Lots of economist-types are attracted to EA, so it’s interesting that the policy arena has been relatively neglected until recently.
Another example, though not as good, could be effective environmentalism. It’s a classic cause among altruists and looks like an x-risk.
Katja Grace (of Meteuphoric) also did some research for Giving What We Can looking into climate change charities. She wrote up her findings as a blog post.
I think the lack of EA work on bad policy comes largely from the heavy competition in the area. To an extent, improving policy is zero-sum in that there are lots of people who are actively working against any particular policy (some good policies receive minimal opposition, but there probably aren’t many of these). Whereas if you, say, donate money to AMF, few people will try to stop you. Even those who disagree with your decision won’t actually prevent you from giving the money and won’t prevent AMF from distributing the bednets.
At the 2014 Effective Altruism Summit, each of Geoff Anders, Peter Thiel, and Holden Karnofsky identified three heuristic criteria for effective altruists to use in selecting a cause area:
neglected
valuable
tractable
I. Why Does Effective Altruism Neglect Ant-Aging?
Anti-aging doesn’t seem very tractable on its face, but neither does existential risk reduction. Despite both being causes within emphasized by rationalists and transhumanists, anti-aging has been left outside of effective altruism thus far. I believe this is because the rationalist community as a precursor to effective altruism better coordinated their concern over existential risk better than their concern over anti-aging efforts.
Like, through Less Wrong, and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, (almost) every existential risk reduction organization got in touch with another. This formed a solid voice advocating for this cause when effective altruism started. On the other hand, Aubrey de Grey and his organization, SENS, seem like the only one(s) in contact with effective altruism, while the rest of the major anti-aging advocates run their organizations out of touch with us, and each other.
Another thing about ant-aging is that while it on its own may seem like a worthy intervention, it often gets lumped with cryonics, and other transhumanist technologies, that seem even less tractable than anti-aging research. That is, those aspects are frequently dismissed by rationalist, let alone effective altruists. So, if the most vocal advocates for anti-aging research only communicate that signal with a bunch of noise, effective altruists may be less likely to consider it.
This seems like a historical contingency to me, based on how the rationalist community organized itself with some circles but not others. This makes possible but by no means definite that the rationalist community has not emphasized anti-aging enough within effective altruism, relative to existential risk reduction.
II. Why Does Effective Altruism Neglect (Better) Policy Advocacy?
This also seems to be due in part to historical contingency. First of all, there is the wariness among the rationalist community that delving into the trenches of politics will be much less tractable than aiding the world through other means. I believe I mildly perceive the same strain of thinking as an undercurrent of utilitarians such as Toby Ord, or Peter Singer.
Also, Givewell thought it much more difficult to assess policy advocacy when measuring impact qualifications for it was much more difficult. In other words, Givewell wanted to cut their teeth, and gain experience, in an area more measurable than policy advocacy. Before, like other charity evaluators they were giving recommendations to individual donors. Now, with Good Ventures, they’re giving recommendations for foundations, with much more money.
In conversation with my friend Joey Savoie a few weeks ago, we discussed maybe Givewell is exploring policy advocacy through the Open Philanthropy Project now because noticeable gains in policy change can only be affected with large investments, and it’s only now with Good Ventures that Givewell has an ally with sufficient weight to get that happening.
My opinion was that anti-aging and existential risk seem roughly equally neglected and roughly equally tractable, but existential risk seems a whole lot more valuable, so hence the focus on that instead.
I concur. This explanation works for why precursor movements to effective altruism such as the rationalist community would have emphasized existential risk over anti-ageing research as well.
I’m not sure that this is necessarily the case among EA orgs with full-time staff. The Centre for Effective Altruism (in particular the Global Priorities Project, which is our collaboration with FHI), The Open Philanthropy Project and the Cambridge Centre on Existential Risk are putting considerable effort into policy work. For example, I and others at CEA put the majority of our time over the past week into policy research, and our trustees were at a meeting at No. 10 Downing Street yesterday. I have written up some of my thoughts on our early policy work at http://effective-altruism.com/ea/7e/good_policy_ideas_that_wont_happen_yet/
I think that there are a few effects going on here which cause policy to appear under-neglected among the community at large...
There is a relatively larger barrier to entry in policy work (compared to e.g. making a donation to a GiveWell recommendation), which means that policy work is often done by people working in this area full-time, or who have past experience in the area. This may be one of the reasons why the community at large isn’t doing more policy analysis. I think it would be useful if the EA community did do more policy analysis, in particular making recommendations of policies that could feasibly happen (i.e. tweak this thing, not ban agriculture subsidies) and doing analyses of the type I outline in my post above (e.g. what are the benefits, what are the costs, who will be in favour, who will be against, how can we change the policy to make it more feasible while retaining most of the benefits, how would we actually make this change, and who do we ultimately need to convince about this to make it happen, etc.). I for one would find this useful in informing the work that I do in this area, and if the ideas are good enough they would likely be taken forwards.
Policy work is often under-publicised unless there are major breakthroughs. In doing this work we are developing ongoing relationships with people, and if we were to publicise these relationships on the internet we could damage them. For this reason we often find it difficult to talk about our policy work extensively in public.
There may also be cultural and path-dependent effects at play here, which people have mentioned above/below and elsewhere, so I won’t go into them in detail.
Effective altruist organizations with full-time staff definitely aren’t neglecting policy advocacy. I meant the broader community at large, in the sense that for the last two years it’s been focusing upon: reducing global poverty and illness; animal advocacy; reducing existential risk.
How can the rest of us help?
This “three factor model” of cause assessment has been used by 80,000 Hours for a long time (they use the terms ‘crowdedness’, ‘importance’ and ‘tractability’). Do we know where it originated?
I think it originated with GiveWell—they used something like this framework for assessing cause areas, which 80k then based their framework on. It’s possible I’m misremembering this though.
Yeah I concur that GiveWell started it.
GiveWell has used this “three factor model” as well (they also use the terms ‘crowdedness,’ ‘importance,’ and ‘tractability’). I’m not sure about the dates when either organization started using this model, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if people started using it independently, since it’s rather intuitive.
It makes sense, but I didn’t know about the model before the Effective Altruism Summit. Having it crystallized is great, and everyone should know about it, so I want to write a post about it for this forum.
This comment is a reminder to myself to write it.
If anyone wants to help me write it, or give feedback, please send me a private message.
I’m surprised in some sense that there hasn’t been more discussion about religion (moreso Eastern religions) in EA, and spreading/working with those religions as an EA cause. Also, psychology and spreading ideas for raising the hedonic treadmill of human populations.
Although I think the causes EA landed on are pretty independent of the historic details, since many independent groups came up with the same causes and they fit objective cause-finding heuristics (e.g. targeting large, marginalized populations).
Anti-aging has come up several times over the years, and it’s never seemed promising enough to warrant further consideration (Edit: on the scale of the other big EA causes). I’m not really sure where the altruism lies here, since most people don’t see death as inherently bad phenomenon. (Edit: I now see that anti-aging research is also focused on increasing quality-of-life rather than just increasing lifespan, so I see the altruism!)
Policy discussion has been around for a while. I think it’s more-so that we’re now reaching the size where we can more easily affect it, which is a good reason to start discussing it more.
Why Have Effective Altruists Neglected Interfacing With Religion?
What’s great about religion is that it’s full of the altruism, but it’s unknown how religion considers effectiveness. I by no means mean that religions are inherently opposed to effectiveness, or even indifferent to it. Religion has played a fundamental role in institutionalizing the very idea of charity. Religiously oriented charities individually run the gamut from effective to ineffective, and I believe that’s more due to the individual organization rather than the religion in question itself. Indeed, it’s the history of trying new charitable interventions inspired by religion that has given humanity a starting place to think about the effectiveness of altruism in the first place.
Historically, religion has implemented altruism without always thinking in terms of effectiveness, because the body of strategies composing effectiveness as an idea was abstract and unknown. It seems without its frame of mind, effective altruism is unsure how to interface with religion.
Another issue is religions tend to be deontological in nature, and while effective altruism accepts deontologists, it wasn’t designed with deontology as the primary framework in mind. So, bridging the epistemic gap between religion and effective altruism may thus be more difficult.
Anyway, I think we could make open calls to effective altruists who:
are religious
were once religious, and feel effective altruism is congruent with their religiously motivated altruism
have received positive feedback from religious folks.
so effective altruism knows better how to reach out to religion.
I am a committed Christian also committed to the principles of effective altruism. I am very frustrated with the level of apathy in the church, given that we are all called to tithe 10% of our income, like the rest of the population Christians have really lost sight of how rich they are now. I am also frustrated by the focus on differences between religions, and between religion and the non religious, when common values of love and concern for our planet giving how utterly amazing it is we are here should prevail. Altruism is at the heart of Christianity and of course it should be effective. I would be happy to work with other EAs in develop an outreach/link strategy into churches.
My wife is head of fundraising for a charity that is like a mini version of Christian aid—donating to poverty alleviating projects in a Christian context. Making this more effective would be a good place to start.
1 billion Christians should be able to make a real dent in the problems of the world if they focussed less on the coffee rota and more on what our faith actually calls us to do.
That’s great, David, and you’re the sort of person I mentioned above. Extending love, compassion, and understanding is a cornerstone of all altruism. I don’t have anything to add now, but I’ll contact you in the future if I broach this topic again.
You might be interested in this chapter on global poverty, utilitarianism, Christian ethics and Peter Singer that I wrote for a Cambridge University Press volume.
http://www.amirrorclear.net/academic/papers/global-poverty.pdf
I would love to see some action in this space. I think there is a natural harmony between what is best in Christianity—especially regarding helping the global poor—and effective altruism.
One person to consider speaking with is Charlie Camosy, who has worked with Peter Singer in the past (see info here). A couple other people to consider talking with would be Catriona Mackay and Alex Foster.
David, which sort of material you think could be persuasive to the higher ecclesiastical orders so that their charity was more focused on Givewell recommended charities and similar sort of evidence based, calculation based giving?
How can we get priests to talk about the child in the pond to the faithful, in a scaleable and tractable manner?
As a result of your faith, are you only interested in working on global poverty, and not x-risk or speciesism?
(It’s great to have you and people like you around; I don’t mean to sound judgemental.)
Religion also often encourages (or is used to defend) speciesism, and it also leads many people to not believe in x-risk. As such, religious EAs are mostly only relevant to 2⁄3 of the major cause areas of EA. Given that I think global poverty is by far the least important of these cause areas, convincing religious people to care about EA doesn’t seem to have very high value to me.
X-risk and animal welfare are still pretty marginalized across the entire population, not just among the religious—and Christians have a very convenient existing infrastructure for collecting money. It might be that there are other reasons not to worry too much about them (e.g. an unmovable hierarchy that controls where the money goes), but their lack of concern for some (or even most) EA target causes doesn’t seem like it should bear much weight.
I think you overlook the strongest argument for spreading religion, namely that by converting people to the One True Faith, we could save them from eternal damnation. As eternity is a long time and damnation is very bad, this would be extremely high QALYs.
Most EAs think all religions are false, so do not subscribe to this argument. However, I do not think religious EAs can avoid this so easily. If you are a Christian EA you should probably try much harder to convert people to Christianity.
My above comment was reasons why effective altruists have found difficulty in reaching out to religion, even though it’s important because much altruism in the world is religiously motivated. However, I understand your point. If someone’s greatest priority is getting others into Heaven by converting them to their own religion, that may be a confounding factor for getting them to do other things.
However, this isn’t the case for all religious people.
How much a religious adherent is supposed to proselytize varies among sects within religions.
From what I know of major world religions, such as Islam, and Christianity, charity is emphasized as an important virtue to act upon independently of, and in addition to, converting others. The moral imperative for charity in religion tends to extend beyond helping only the less fortunate of one’s own religion.
Humans tend to signal their association with an ideology by committing to the goals set out for its adherents. When the goal seems far away, it’s easy for people to promise to achieve it. When the goal is very nearby, its difficulty becomes more apparent, and more people will shirk it. This is called construal-level theory. If you accept that model, I believe it extend to religious conversion. (Some) religious leaders will call upon their followers to convert the unbelieving, yet everyday those same followers fail to confront their neighbors, friends, families, and colleagues from believing differently. As the world becomes more globally interdependent, lots will realize the value in helping and cooperating with groups of outsiders, and their unfortunate.
Religion blends with other cultural forces in people’s lives to cause a diverse array of how they practice, and that still allows effective altruism for millions of religious folks.
Yes, I basically agree. But I think you have slightly misunderstand my argument. Many religions say both
1) You should convert people 2) You should help people
Obviously not all religions say these (for example Judaism is not very evangelical). My argument isn’t that religious people should proletize because of 2). My argument is that, given religious people’s other beliefs about heaven and hell, they should proletize because that is the most effective way of helping people. Even if their religion included no evangelical commandments, they should try to convert people as the most effective way of loving their neighbors. A secular EA charity might try to persuade people in the less economically developed countries to purify their water; a religious EA charity might try to persuade people in the developing world to say their hail marys.
What does that mean? Anti-aging medication or technology (if it worked) would generate returns not just to the people who engage in the research, but to many others. In that respect, I don’t see how it’s qualitatively different from trying to prevent or cure malaria, AIDS, or NTDs. (Quantitative differences arise mostly from cost-effectiveness and feasibility).
I’m not seeing what those returns are other than (i) preventing death, and (ii) improving quality-of-life (which also happens in other medical research). It seems like the value-added is (i), which is why I made my original statement.
So, in a way, curing malaria is anti-aging research. If you extend anti-aging research to any research to prevent illnesses with high mortality, then sure. But why give it a new name then? Is it just a broader term than “disease prevention”?
Anti-aging focuses specifically on extending the “healthspan” of people (starting in the developed world, presumably) past the current point where age-related degenerative diseases start to eat into your QALYs.
It’s different from disease prevention because it operates higher than at the level of individual diseases, hoping to solve the underlying reasons why age is so strongly contributory to those diseases.
Anti-aging also tends to have absurdly high RFMF compared to most disease research, since it’s a “weird” idea that most people don’t like.
It also seems high impact: it would serve as a multiplier for any earlier-in-life health improvements as well as allowing some high-skill people to keep contributing to society (e.g., researchers who have accumulated lots of valuable knowledge and experience).
General anti-aging research is arguably more effective than trying to cure any single disease, because once your body begins to decline due to advanced age, that makes you more susceptible to basically all diseases and injuries. Successful anti-aging treatments would thus act as a general, massive health boost to everyone past a certain age.
When I speak of effectiveness, I generally mean, “For X amount of effort, how much good would this path lead to?” I agree that successfully giving a general, massive health boost would probably be better than curing a single disease, but I worry that the broader approach has less impact-per-effort.
I discussed estimating the cost-effectiveness of anti-ageing research at the very end of my talk at the Good Done Right conference. There’s actually an error in my formula there, so it should be 20 times less effective than I said. I don’t think we should have deep confidence in the answer coming out, but I do think it’s suggestive enough that it may be worth more careful estimation.
Given it’s history, I’m not surprised that the EA movement is currently primarily non-religious people. But I am surprised that no one has tried talking to/at churches, which could be very useful, if it worked. I would guess that some denominations would be more open to it than others.
Interesting:
And a summary of an article behind a paywall that
I’m not surprised by that at all. Most EAs are non-religious or at least weakly religious, and spreading religion is a non-intuitive idea for non-religious people. Even for religious people, it doesn’t make much sense to spread other religions.
“Spreading ideas for raising the hedonic treadmill of human populations” seems like part of the Hedonistic Imperative, as espoused by David Pearce.
If so, it seems to me like its an idea leaning towards transhumanism that doesn’t seem tractable in the present, with the requisite technology to achieve such goals coming at some unknown future point (at best), and with lots of people unable to grasp how where we start researching or advocating for such an abstract cause.
I personally have sympathy for its sentiment, but this is just my hypothesis for the conclusion skeptical effective altruists reach.
It seems obvious there hasn’t been (much) discussion of Eastern religions because effective altruism is primarily represented in English-speaking and Western(ized) countries, which are traditionally Abrahamic in religion. I know that Benjamin Todd of 80,000 Hours has personally read much Taoism, and of Chinese culture, so asking him for perspective may prove worthwhile.
A really superb book I have never seen highlighted by EAs is Human Purpose and Transhuman Potential:A Cosmic Vision for Our Future Evolution by Ted Chu, PhD. He has been the chief economist of GM amongst other things so he is very smart and well grounded, and it’s an amazing intellectual feat. I raise it as it covers all of the religious wisdom across all faiths within the book—I found it hugely thought provoking.