Suppose that the EA community were transported to the UK and US in 1776. How fast would slavery have been abolished? Recall that the slave trade ended in 1807 in the UK and 1808 in the US, and abolition happened between 1838-1843 in the British Empire and 1865 in the US.
Assumptions:
Not sure how to define âEA communityâ, but some groups that should definitely be included are the entire staff of OpenPhil and CEA, anyone who dedicates their career choices or donates more than 10% along EA principles, and anyone with >5k EA forum karma.
EAs have the same proportion of the population as they do now, as well as the same relative levels of wealth, political power, intelligence, and drive.
EAs forget all our post-1776 historical knowledge, including the historical paths to abolition.
EA attention is split among other top causes of the day, like infectious disease and crop yields. I canât think of a reason why antislavery would be totally ignored by EAs though, as it seems huge in scope and highly morally salient to people like Bentham.
Iâm also interested in speculating on other causes, Iâve just been thinking about abolition recently due to the 80k podcast with Prof. Christopher Brown.
Note that (according to ChatGPT) Quakers were more dedicated to abolition than EAs are to animal advocacy, have a much larger population, and deserve lots of moral credit for abolition in real life. But my guess would be that EAs could find some angles the Quakers wouldnât due to the consequentialist principles of EA. Maybe more evangelism and growth (Quaker population declined in the early 1800s), pragmatism about compensating slaveholders in the US as was done in the UK, or direct political action. Could EAs have gotten the Fugitive Slave Clause out of the Constitution?
I suspect the net impact would be pretty low. Most of the really compelling consequentialist arguments like âif we donât agree to this there will be a massive civil war in futureâ and âan Industrial Revolution will leave everyone far richer anywayâ are future knowledge that your thought experiment strips people of. It didnât take complex utility calculations to persuade people that slaves experienced welfare loss; it took deontological arguments versed [mainly] in religious belief to convince people that slaves were actually people whose needs deserved attention. And Jeremy Bentham was already there to offer utilitarian arguments, to the extent people were willing to listen to them.
And I suspect that whilst a poll of Oxford-educated utilitarian pragmatists with a futurist mindset transported back to 1776 would near-unanimously agree that slavery wasnât a good thing, theyâd probably devote far more of their time and money to stuff they saw as more tractable like infectious diseases and crop yields, writing some neat Benthamite literature and maybe a bit of wondering whether Newcomen engines and canals made the apocalypse more likely.
I canât imagine the messy political compromise that was the US constitution being something that EAs would be skilled at negotiating even if they were in a position to do, so I donât see why theyâd be able to get rid of the Fugitive Slave Clause. They might have decided helping fugitive slaves was an effective way of helping people and concluded they had an ethical obligation to spend lots of money on it. Or concluded it was more cost-effective to leave them be and buy a few more slavesâ freedom legally instead...
I disagree with a few points, especially paragraph 1. Are you saying that people were worried about abolition slowing down economic growth and lowering standards of living? I havenât heard this as a significant concernâfree labor was perfectly capable of producing cotton at a small premium, and there were significant British boycotts of slave-produced products like cotton and sugar.
As for utilitarian arguments, thatâs not the main way I imagine EAs would help. EA pragmatists would prioritize the cause for utilitarian reasons and do whatever is best to achieve their policy goals, much as we are already doing for animal welfare. The success of EAs in animal welfare, or indeed anywhere other than x-risk, is in implementation of things like corporate campaigns rather than mass spreading of arguments. Even in x-risk, an alliance with natsec people has effected concrete policy outcomes like compute export controls.
To paragraph 2, the number of philosophers is pretty low in contemporary EA. We just hear about them more. And while abolition might have been relatively intractable in the US, my guess is the UK could have been sped up.
I basically agree with paragraph 3, though I would hope if it came to it we would find something more economical than directly freeing slaves.
Overall thanks for the thoughtful response! I wouldnât mind discussing this more.
Are you saying that people were worried about abolition slowing down economic growth and lowering standards of living? I havenât heard this as a significant concernâfree labor was perfectly capable of producing cotton at a small premium, and there were significant British boycotts of slave-produced products like cotton and sugar.
Absolutely slaveholders and those dependent on them were worried about their own standard of living (and more importantly, specifically not interested in significantly improving the standard of living of plantation slaves, and not because theyâd never heard anyone put forward the idea that all people were equal. I mean, some of them were on first name terms with Thomas Paine and signed the Declaration of Independence and still didnât release their slaves!). Iâm sure most people who were sympathetic to EA ideas would have strongly disagreed with this prioritisation decision, just like the Quakers or Jeremy Bentham. I just donât think theyâd have been more influential than the Quakers or Jeremy Bentham, or indeed the deeply religious abolitionists lead by William Wilberforce.
I agree the number of philosophers in EA is quite low, but Iâm assuming the influence centre would be similar, possibly even more Oxford-centric, in a pre-internet, status-obsessed social environment where discourse is more centred on physical places and elite institutions[1]. For related reasons I think theyâd be influential in the sort of place where abolitionist arguments were already getting a fair hearing, and of little consequence in slaveowning towns in the Deep South. In the UK, I think the political process was held up by the amount of vested interests in keeping it going in Parliament and beliefs that slavery was âthe natural orderâ rather than any lack of zeal or arguments or resources on the abolitionist side (though Iâm sure theyâd have been grateful for press baron Moskovitzâs donations!). I think you could make the argument that slave trade abolition in the UK was actually pretty early considering the revenues it generated, who benefited, and the generally deeply inegalitarian social values and assumption of racial superiority of British society at the time.
As for utilitarian arguments, thatâs not the main way I imagine EAs would help. EA pragmatists would prioritize the cause for utilitarian reasons and do whatever is best to achieve their policy goals, much as we are already doing for animal welfare. The success of EAs in animal welfare, or indeed anywhere other than x-risk, is in implementation of things like corporate campaigns rather than mass spreading of arguments.
I agree this is probably the main way that EAs would try to help, I just donât think abolitionism is an area where this would have much impact (both due to it being a centralised political problem, and due to existing abolitionists already being quite sophisticated when it came to boycotts and literature distribution and freedom suits). I can totally imagine historic EAs trying to find more efficient means to distribute poor relief and shaming bad farmers (and doing some stuff that seemed like a it might be effective at the time like abstinence campaigns to ward off Mathusian catastrophes), I just donât think it would change much on the politics of slavery which wars were to be fought over. I guess it also depends on how much knowledge they get to take back with them. Introducing RCTs to medicine in the 1770s would have been revolutionary![2]
I agree a more general âwhat would EA be like in different eras and what would their priorities have beenâ would be an interesting thread.
Feels more in keeping with the thought experiment and the actual responsibilities of the modern movement to have EAs include people who are super impressed by papers they read by Jon Snow and Florence Nightingale and want to put that sort of analysis into practice in more places. Which still could have speeded up evidence based medicine a lot, but over half a century later...
Worth noting that if there are like 10,000 EAs today in the world with a population of 8,000,000,000, the percentage of EAs globally is 0.000125 percent.
If we keep the same proportion and apply that to the world population in 1776, there would be about 1,000 EAs globally and about 3 EAs in the United States. If they were overrepresented in the United States by a factor of ten, there would be about 30.
I guess on one hand, if this were the case, then EAs would be well-represented in America, given that itâs population in 1776 was just 2.5M, vs. the UK population of 8M.
On the other hand, Iâd assume that if they were distributed across the US, many would have been farmers /â low-income workers /â slaves, so wouldnât have been able to contribute much. There is an interesting question on how much labor mobility or inequality there was at the time.
Also, it seems like EAs got incredibly lucky with Dustin Moskovitz + Good Ventures. Itâs hard to picture just how lucky we were with that, and what the corresponding scenarios would have been like in 1776.
I also think the heavy EA bent against activism and politics wouldnât have helped, as both of those routes were key parts of the pathway to ban slavery in the UK at least (I donât know much about the US)
Suppose that the EA community were transported to the UK and US in 1776. How fast would slavery have been abolished? Recall that the slave trade ended in 1807 in the UK and 1808 in the US, and abolition happened between 1838-1843 in the British Empire and 1865 in the US.
Assumptions:
Not sure how to define âEA communityâ, but some groups that should definitely be included are the entire staff of OpenPhil and CEA, anyone who dedicates their career choices or donates more than 10% along EA principles, and anyone with >5k EA forum karma.
EAs have the same proportion of the population as they do now, as well as the same relative levels of wealth, political power, intelligence, and drive.
EAs forget all our post-1776 historical knowledge, including the historical paths to abolition.
EA attention is split among other top causes of the day, like infectious disease and crop yields. I canât think of a reason why antislavery would be totally ignored by EAs though, as it seems huge in scope and highly morally salient to people like Bentham.
Iâm also interested in speculating on other causes, Iâve just been thinking about abolition recently due to the 80k podcast with Prof. Christopher Brown.
Note that (according to ChatGPT) Quakers were more dedicated to abolition than EAs are to animal advocacy, have a much larger population, and deserve lots of moral credit for abolition in real life. But my guess would be that EAs could find some angles the Quakers wouldnât due to the consequentialist principles of EA. Maybe more evangelism and growth (Quaker population declined in the early 1800s), pragmatism about compensating slaveholders in the US as was done in the UK, or direct political action. Could EAs have gotten the Fugitive Slave Clause out of the Constitution?
I suspect the net impact would be pretty low. Most of the really compelling consequentialist arguments like âif we donât agree to this there will be a massive civil war in futureâ and âan Industrial Revolution will leave everyone far richer anywayâ are future knowledge that your thought experiment strips people of. It didnât take complex utility calculations to persuade people that slaves experienced welfare loss; it took deontological arguments versed [mainly] in religious belief to convince people that slaves were actually people whose needs deserved attention. And Jeremy Bentham was already there to offer utilitarian arguments, to the extent people were willing to listen to them.
And I suspect that whilst a poll of Oxford-educated utilitarian pragmatists with a futurist mindset transported back to 1776 would near-unanimously agree that slavery wasnât a good thing, theyâd probably devote far more of their time and money to stuff they saw as more tractable like infectious diseases and crop yields, writing some neat Benthamite literature and maybe a bit of wondering whether Newcomen engines and canals made the apocalypse more likely.
I canât imagine the messy political compromise that was the US constitution being something that EAs would be skilled at negotiating even if they were in a position to do, so I donât see why theyâd be able to get rid of the Fugitive Slave Clause. They might have decided helping fugitive slaves was an effective way of helping people and concluded they had an ethical obligation to spend lots of money on it. Or concluded it was more cost-effective to leave them be and buy a few more slavesâ freedom legally instead...
I disagree with a few points, especially paragraph 1. Are you saying that people were worried about abolition slowing down economic growth and lowering standards of living? I havenât heard this as a significant concernâfree labor was perfectly capable of producing cotton at a small premium, and there were significant British boycotts of slave-produced products like cotton and sugar.
As for utilitarian arguments, thatâs not the main way I imagine EAs would help. EA pragmatists would prioritize the cause for utilitarian reasons and do whatever is best to achieve their policy goals, much as we are already doing for animal welfare. The success of EAs in animal welfare, or indeed anywhere other than x-risk, is in implementation of things like corporate campaigns rather than mass spreading of arguments. Even in x-risk, an alliance with natsec people has effected concrete policy outcomes like compute export controls.
To paragraph 2, the number of philosophers is pretty low in contemporary EA. We just hear about them more. And while abolition might have been relatively intractable in the US, my guess is the UK could have been sped up.
I basically agree with paragraph 3, though I would hope if it came to it we would find something more economical than directly freeing slaves.
Overall thanks for the thoughtful response! I wouldnât mind discussing this more.
Absolutely slaveholders and those dependent on them were worried about their own standard of living (and more importantly, specifically not interested in significantly improving the standard of living of plantation slaves, and not because theyâd never heard anyone put forward the idea that all people were equal. I mean, some of them were on first name terms with Thomas Paine and signed the Declaration of Independence and still didnât release their slaves!). Iâm sure most people who were sympathetic to EA ideas would have strongly disagreed with this prioritisation decision, just like the Quakers or Jeremy Bentham. I just donât think theyâd have been more influential than the Quakers or Jeremy Bentham, or indeed the deeply religious abolitionists lead by William Wilberforce.
I agree the number of philosophers in EA is quite low, but Iâm assuming the influence centre would be similar, possibly even more Oxford-centric, in a pre-internet, status-obsessed social environment where discourse is more centred on physical places and elite institutions[1]. For related reasons I think theyâd be influential in the sort of place where abolitionist arguments were already getting a fair hearing, and of little consequence in slaveowning towns in the Deep South. In the UK, I think the political process was held up by the amount of vested interests in keeping it going in Parliament and beliefs that slavery was âthe natural orderâ rather than any lack of zeal or arguments or resources on the abolitionist side (though Iâm sure theyâd have been grateful for press baron Moskovitzâs donations!). I think you could make the argument that slave trade abolition in the UK was actually pretty early considering the revenues it generated, who benefited, and the generally deeply inegalitarian social values and assumption of racial superiority of British society at the time.
I agree this is probably the main way that EAs would try to help, I just donât think abolitionism is an area where this would have much impact (both due to it being a centralised political problem, and due to existing abolitionists already being quite sophisticated when it came to boycotts and literature distribution and freedom suits). I can totally imagine historic EAs trying to find more efficient means to distribute poor relief and shaming bad farmers (and doing some stuff that seemed like a it might be effective at the time like abstinence campaigns to ward off Mathusian catastrophes), I just donât think it would change much on the politics of slavery which wars were to be fought over. I guess it also depends on how much knowledge they get to take back with them. Introducing RCTs to medicine in the 1770s would have been revolutionary![2]
I agree a more general âwhat would EA be like in different eras and what would their priorities have beenâ would be an interesting thread.
Iâm also not sure what all the AI researchers would do, but I guess it would involve reading and writing papers
Feels more in keeping with the thought experiment and the actual responsibilities of the modern movement to have EAs include people who are super impressed by papers they read by Jon Snow and Florence Nightingale and want to put that sort of analysis into practice in more places. Which still could have speeded up evidence based medicine a lot, but over half a century later...
Worth noting that if there are like 10,000 EAs today in the world with a population of 8,000,000,000, the percentage of EAs globally is 0.000125 percent.
If we keep the same proportion and apply that to the world population in 1776, there would be about 1,000 EAs globally and about 3 EAs in the United States. If they were overrepresented in the United States by a factor of ten, there would be about 30.
I was imagining a split similar to the present, in which over half of EAs were American or British.
I guess on one hand, if this were the case, then EAs would be well-represented in America, given that itâs population in 1776 was just 2.5M, vs. the UK population of 8M.
On the other hand, Iâd assume that if they were distributed across the US, many would have been farmers /â low-income workers /â slaves, so wouldnât have been able to contribute much. There is an interesting question on how much labor mobility or inequality there was at the time.
Also, it seems like EAs got incredibly lucky with Dustin Moskovitz + Good Ventures. Itâs hard to picture just how lucky we were with that, and what the corresponding scenarios would have been like in 1776.
Could make for neat historical fiction.
On the positive front, some surprisingly EA adjacent people were part of the movement which did get slavery banned.
I also think the heavy EA bent against activism and politics wouldnât have helped, as both of those routes were key parts of the pathway to ban slavery in the UK at least (I donât know much about the US)