I was recently reading the book Subvert! by Daniel Cleather (a colleague) and thought that this quote from Karl Popper and the author’s preceding description of Popper’s position sounded very similar to EAs method of cause prioritisation and theory of change in the world. (Although I believe Popper is writing in the context of fighting against threats to democracy rather than threats to well-being, humanity, etc.) I haven’t read The Open Society and Its Enemies (or any of Popper’s books for that matter), but I’m now quite interested to see if he draws any other parallels to EA.
For the philosophical point of view, I again lean heavily on Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies. Within the book, he is sceptical of projects that seek to reform society based upon some grand utopian vision. Firstly, he argues that such projects tend to require the exercise of strong authority to drive them. Secondly, he describes the difficulty in describing exactly what utopia is, and that as change occurs, the vision of utopia will shift. Instead he advocates for “piecemeal social engineering” as the optimal approach for reforming society which he describes as follows:
“The piecemeal engineer will, accordingly, adopt the method of searching for, and fighting against, the greatest and most urgent evils of society, rather than searching for, and fighting for, its greatest ultimate good.”
I also quite enjoyed Subvert! And would recommend that as a fresh perspective on the philosophy of science. A key point from the book is:
The problem is that in practice, scientists often adopt a sceptical, not a subversive, stance. They are happy to scrutinise their opponents results when they are presented at conferences and in papers. However, they are less likely to be actively subversive, and to perform their own studies to test their opponents’ theories. Instead, they prefer to direct their efforts towards finding evidence in support of their own ideas. The ideal mode would be that the proposers and testers of hypotheses would be different people. In practice they end up being the same person.
I was recently reading the book Subvert! by Daniel Cleather (a colleague) and thought that this quote from Karl Popper and the author’s preceding description of Popper’s position sounded very similar to EAs method of cause prioritisation and theory of change in the world. (Although I believe Popper is writing in the context of fighting against threats to democracy rather than threats to well-being, humanity, etc.) I haven’t read The Open Society and Its Enemies (or any of Popper’s books for that matter), but I’m now quite interested to see if he draws any other parallels to EA.
I also quite enjoyed Subvert! And would recommend that as a fresh perspective on the philosophy of science. A key point from the book is: