Yeah, those four categories work better. I’ll just do that in the future. I’ll also cite your criteria. I have notes corresponding to a more systematic breakdown of this, basically trying to cover all of effective altruism. The other foci I include are causes, and are:
i) Globay Poverty Reduction and Global Health: this includes charities recommended by Givewell and The Life You Can Save.
ii) Animal Stewardship: this includes charities recommended by Animal Charity Evaluations, and additionally Direct Action Everywhere and Faunalytics (organizations which identify with effectiveness as a criterion for doing good, but don’t explicitly identify with effective altruism as a movement).
iii) Globally Catastrophic and Existential Risk Reduction: includes MIRI, CSER, FHI, etc.
iv) Policy and Economics: would include the Open Philanthropy Project, your Evidence-Based Policy Project, the Center for Global Development (which has received multiple grants for Good Ventures), EA Policy Analytics, GCRI, GPP, and the Open Borders Action Group.
v) Political and Systemic Change: a category like advocacy, but it looks very different from what EA orgs do. Direct Action Everywhere and Open Borders Action Group are two examples, who raise awareness in very public ways, through, e.g., protest action, more so than effective altruism organizations like Charity Science or Raising for Effective Giving who raise funds and advocate at only semi-public events or on a smaller-scale. These organizations are adjacent to effective altruism but not so core, as there has been dispute about whether the issues they’re tackling and how they’re tackling them constitute a tractable way of doing things. I may drop this category.
I’m thinking of keeping the division between “Foundational Research” and maybe “Scientific Research”, though. While new, improving scientific research is something Open Phil has a good chance of funding in the future, as well as New Harvest and other organizations doing work in the natural sciences entering effective altruism more. I think that constitutes a category in itself. This laboratory work, or whether industrial or academic, likely doesn’t have much in common with, e.g., FHI, Leverage Research and the Foundational Research Institute, which mostly do philosophy. Those three organizations seem to have much more common with each other.
However, “scientific research” might be an object-level cause. It’s the one cause where it’s very difficult to tell how we ought to think of it. For example, is developing a vaccine for ebola an object-level project, or is it a meta-project, with distributing the vaccine being the only true objective of the program? I don’t know.
This is a very good start, and I think you’re capable of doing this well. I’m thinking, though, that policy-work can be one method of reducing global poverty, whereas giving to charity is another one. So perhaps you want two dimensions—one for methods, and one for objectives.
Or alternatively, you might want to distinguish problem-oriented organizations, which use any method to solve a given problem (say X-risk) from method-oriented organizations which perfect a given method (say influencing the government) which they apply to lots of areas.
You seem to have a very comprehensive grasp of the different EA organizations, which is obviously very useful when you do this categorization work.
Yeah, those four categories work better. I’ll just do that in the future. I’ll also cite your criteria. I have notes corresponding to a more systematic breakdown of this, basically trying to cover all of effective altruism. The other foci I include are causes, and are:
i) Globay Poverty Reduction and Global Health: this includes charities recommended by Givewell and The Life You Can Save.
ii) Animal Stewardship: this includes charities recommended by Animal Charity Evaluations, and additionally Direct Action Everywhere and Faunalytics (organizations which identify with effectiveness as a criterion for doing good, but don’t explicitly identify with effective altruism as a movement).
iii) Globally Catastrophic and Existential Risk Reduction: includes MIRI, CSER, FHI, etc.
iv) Policy and Economics: would include the Open Philanthropy Project, your Evidence-Based Policy Project, the Center for Global Development (which has received multiple grants for Good Ventures), EA Policy Analytics, GCRI, GPP, and the Open Borders Action Group.
v) Political and Systemic Change: a category like advocacy, but it looks very different from what EA orgs do. Direct Action Everywhere and Open Borders Action Group are two examples, who raise awareness in very public ways, through, e.g., protest action, more so than effective altruism organizations like Charity Science or Raising for Effective Giving who raise funds and advocate at only semi-public events or on a smaller-scale. These organizations are adjacent to effective altruism but not so core, as there has been dispute about whether the issues they’re tackling and how they’re tackling them constitute a tractable way of doing things. I may drop this category.
I’m thinking of keeping the division between “Foundational Research” and maybe “Scientific Research”, though. While new, improving scientific research is something Open Phil has a good chance of funding in the future, as well as New Harvest and other organizations doing work in the natural sciences entering effective altruism more. I think that constitutes a category in itself. This laboratory work, or whether industrial or academic, likely doesn’t have much in common with, e.g., FHI, Leverage Research and the Foundational Research Institute, which mostly do philosophy. Those three organizations seem to have much more common with each other.
However, “scientific research” might be an object-level cause. It’s the one cause where it’s very difficult to tell how we ought to think of it. For example, is developing a vaccine for ebola an object-level project, or is it a meta-project, with distributing the vaccine being the only true objective of the program? I don’t know.
This is a very good start, and I think you’re capable of doing this well. I’m thinking, though, that policy-work can be one method of reducing global poverty, whereas giving to charity is another one. So perhaps you want two dimensions—one for methods, and one for objectives.
Or alternatively, you might want to distinguish problem-oriented organizations, which use any method to solve a given problem (say X-risk) from method-oriented organizations which perfect a given method (say influencing the government) which they apply to lots of areas.
You seem to have a very comprehensive grasp of the different EA organizations, which is obviously very useful when you do this categorization work.