(Also, to be honest, it makes me look bad when I claim something is cost-effective but can’t provide a single real-world example with numbers to back up that claim.)
I think it’s an epistemic issue inherent to impacts caused by influencing decision making.
For example, let’s say I present a very specific, well-documented question: “Did dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki save more lives than it took?”
The costs here are specific: Mainly deaths caused by the atomic bombs (roughly 200k people)
The lives saved are also established: Deaths caused by each day the Japanese forces continued fighting, projections of deaths caused by the planned invasion of mainland Japan and famines caused the naval blockade of Japan.
There are detailed records of the entire decision making process at both a personal and macro level. In fact, a lot of the key decision makers were alive post-war to give their opinions. However, the question remains controversial in public discourse because it’s hard to pin a number to factors influencing policy decisions. Could you argue that since the Soviet declaring war was the trigger for surrender, mayyyybe the surrender would have happened without the bombs?
Activism is way more nebulous and multivariate, so even significant impacts would be hard to quantify in an EA framework. Personally, I do see the case for underweighing activism within EA. So many other movement already prioritise activism, and in my experience it’s super difficult to make quantitative arguments when a culture centres around advocacy. However, I would really like to see some exploration, if only so I don’t have to switch gears between my diff friend groups.
The question remains though – especially when talking to funders and nonprofit leaders skeptical of advocacy (a lot of them jaded from personal experience), I’m unpersuasive when I claim something is cost-effective but can’t provide a single real-world example with numbers to back up that claim, so I’ve stopped doing that. Sure activism is nebulous and multivariate; so are many business decisions (to analogize), and yet it’s still useful to do quantitative estimation if you keep in mind that
the point isn’t to “pin a number”, it’s to reduce uncertainty to improve decision-making (Doug Hubbard corrects this misconception in How to Measure Anything, which is mainly about business decisions)
the main value of quantitative estimation (to me) is in surfacing and prioritizing new key questions that merely verbal argumentation wouldn’t highlight, cf. Holden Karnofsky on the value of GiveWell’s CEAs, more so than just ranking stuff
I have no idea honestly if activism should be over- or underweighted in EA; I suspect the answer is the economist’s favorite: “it depends”. I’d like to see more research on what makes some advocacy efforts more effective that’s adaptable to other efforts/contexts. And as a (small) donor myself I’m interested in allocating part of my “bets” capital to advocacy-related orgs like XR if I see / can make a persuasive marginal cost-effectiveness estimate for their efforts.
I think it’s an epistemic issue inherent to impacts caused by influencing decision making.
For example, let’s say I present a very specific, well-documented question: “Did dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki save more lives than it took?”
The costs here are specific: Mainly deaths caused by the atomic bombs (roughly 200k people)
The lives saved are also established: Deaths caused by each day the Japanese forces continued fighting, projections of deaths caused by the planned invasion of mainland Japan and famines caused the naval blockade of Japan.
There are detailed records of the entire decision making process at both a personal and macro level. In fact, a lot of the key decision makers were alive post-war to give their opinions. However, the question remains controversial in public discourse because it’s hard to pin a number to factors influencing policy decisions. Could you argue that since the Soviet declaring war was the trigger for surrender, mayyyybe the surrender would have happened without the bombs?
Activism is way more nebulous and multivariate, so even significant impacts would be hard to quantify in an EA framework. Personally, I do see the case for underweighing activism within EA. So many other movement already prioritise activism, and in my experience it’s super difficult to make quantitative arguments when a culture centres around advocacy. However, I would really like to see some exploration, if only so I don’t have to switch gears between my diff friend groups.
The question remains though – especially when talking to funders and nonprofit leaders skeptical of advocacy (a lot of them jaded from personal experience), I’m unpersuasive when I claim something is cost-effective but can’t provide a single real-world example with numbers to back up that claim, so I’ve stopped doing that. Sure activism is nebulous and multivariate; so are many business decisions (to analogize), and yet it’s still useful to do quantitative estimation if you keep in mind that
the point isn’t to “pin a number”, it’s to reduce uncertainty to improve decision-making (Doug Hubbard corrects this misconception in How to Measure Anything, which is mainly about business decisions)
the main value of quantitative estimation (to me) is in surfacing and prioritizing new key questions that merely verbal argumentation wouldn’t highlight, cf. Holden Karnofsky on the value of GiveWell’s CEAs, more so than just ranking stuff
I have no idea honestly if activism should be over- or underweighted in EA; I suspect the answer is the economist’s favorite: “it depends”. I’d like to see more research on what makes some advocacy efforts more effective that’s adaptable to other efforts/contexts. And as a (small) donor myself I’m interested in allocating part of my “bets” capital to advocacy-related orgs like XR if I see / can make a persuasive marginal cost-effectiveness estimate for their efforts.