MichaelA🔸 comments on MichaelA’s Quick takes

[MichaelA🔸]

Collection of EA analyses of how social social movements rise, fall, can be influential, etc.

Movement collapse scenarios—Rebecca Baron

Why do social movements fail: Two concrete examples. - NunoSempere

What the EA community can learn from the rise of the neoliberals—Kerry Vaughan

How valuable is movement growth? - Owen Cotton-Barratt (and I think this is sort-of a summary of that article)

Long-Term Influence and Movement Growth: Two Historical Case Studies—Aron Vallinder, 2018

Some of the Sentience Institute’s research, such as its “social movement case studies”* and the post How tractable is changing the course of history?

A Framework for Assessing the Potential of EA Development in Emerging Locations* - jahying

EA considerations regarding increasing political polarization—Alfred Dreyfus, 2020

Hard-to-reverse decisions destroy option value—Schubert & Garfinkel, 2017

These aren’t quite “EA analyses”, but Slate Star Codex has several relevant book reviews and other posts, such as:

• https://​​slatestarcodex.com/​​2019/​​03/​​18/​​book-review-inventing-the-future/​​

• https://​​slatestarcodex.com/​​2018/​​04/​​30/​​book-review-history-of-the-fabian-society/​​

It appears Animal Charity Evaluators did relevant research, but I haven’t read it, they described it as having been “of variable quality”, and they’ve discontinued it.

In this comment, Pablo Stafforini refers to some relevant work that sounds like it’s non-public.

See also my collection of work on value drift, and my list of some history topics it might be very valuable to investigate.

*Asterisks indicate I haven’t read that source myself, and thus that the source might not actually be a good fit for this list.

Notes

I intend to add to this list over time. If you know of other relevant work, please mention it in a comment.

Also, I’m aware that there are a lot of non-EA analyses of these topics. The reasons I’m collecting only EA analyses here are that:

• their precise focuses or methodologies may be more relevant to other EAs than would be the case with non-EA analyses

• links to non-EA work can be found in most of the things I list here

• I’d guess that many collections of non-EA analyses of these topics already exist (e.g., in reference lists)

[Vaidehi Agarwalla 🔸]

I have a list here that has some overlap but also some new things: https://​​docs.google.com/​​document/​​d/​​1KyVgBuq_X95Hn6LrgCVj2DTiNHQXrPUJse-tlo8-CEM/​​edit#

[MichaelA🔸]

That looks very helpful—thanks for sharing it here!

[rosehadshar]

Some more recent things:

• Mauricio, What Helped the Voiceless? Historical Case Studies (and a shorter version here)

• James Ozden, A case for the effectiveness of protest

Also fwiw, I have read the ACE case studies, and I think that the one on environmentalism is pretty high quality, more so than some of the other things listed here. I’d recommend people interested in working on this stuff to read the environmentalism one.

[rosehadshar]

Another one: Alex Hill and Jaime Sevilla, Attempt at understanding the role of moral philosophy in moral progress (on women’s suffrage and animal rights)

[evakat]

One to add to the list: More Than Just Good Causes. A Framework For Understanding How Social Movements Contribute To Change by Eugenia Lafforgue and Brett Mills (Future Matters Project)

[Shri_Samson]

This is probably too broad but here’s Open Philanthropy’s list of case studies on the History of Philanthropy which includes ones they have commissioned, though most are not done by EAs with the exception of Some Case Studies in Early Field Growth by Luke Muehlhauser.

Edit: fixed links

[MichaelA🔸]

Yeah, I think those are relevant, thanks for mentioning them!

It looks like the links lead back to your comment for some reason (I think I’ve done similar in the past). So, for other readers, here are the links I think you mean: 1, 2.

(Also, FWIW, I think if an analysis is by a non-EA by commissioned by an EA, I’d say that essentially counts as an “EA analysis” for my purposes. This is because I expect that such work’s “precise focuses or methodologies may be more relevant to other EAs than would be the case with [most] non-EA analyses”.)