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.
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?