Also I’m not clear over how wide your definition of “meta-level work” is. Sometimes it seems like your mostly talking about work on movement growth, but organizations like CFAR who don’t work on movement growth are also counted as meta-organizations.
Finally, let me add that we should remember that it’s not always clear how to distinguish between meta-level and object-level work.
Stefan (or, Dr. Schubert? You have a Ph.D., and I don’t know what’s the most appropriate way to address you in this setting), I commented that I think the current definition effective altruism uses for meta-level work is not granular enough, and this likely causes significant problems in our decision-making. I broke this down into “cause prioritization” and “movement growth”. However, you make me realize there needs to be more distinctions than that. Here is my list for dinstinguishing meta-level work in effective altruism[1].
Cause Prioritization: Givewell; Open Philanthropy Project; Global Priorities Project
Charity Prioritization[2]: Givewell; Animal Charity Evaluators; Future of Life Institute
Foundational Research[3]: Foundational Research Institute; Future of Humanity Institute; Leverage Research; Center For Applied Rationality
Community Growth, Development, and Management: Center For Applied Rationality[4]; Giving What We Can; Raising for Effective Giving; The Life You Can Save; Effective Altruism Outreach; Effective Altruism Ventures; Effective Altruism Action; 80,000 Hours
Fundraising and Advocacy: Charity Science; Raising for Effective Giving; The Life You Can Save; Giving What We Can; Effective Altruism Ventures; Centre for Effective Altruism
Original/Applied Research[5]: Center For Applied Rationality; Charity Science; 80,000 Hours
Community Support[6]: CFAR; 80k; CEA; .impact
If you look at all this diversity and how putting all this in one cause makes for strange bedfellows across organizations, I concur with Peter meta-work, while important, isn’t a cause in its own right, and it makes more sense to think of different meta-charities just filling different roles within effective altruism. Some meta-charities are specific to an object-level cause or two, and some are not.
[1] Most meta-charities seem to occupy more than one of these charities.
[2] Prioritizing between charities within a single cause, rather than prioritizing between causes.
[3] Research not specific to a single cause, but aimed at improving decision-making, cause prioritization, and cause selection as processes themselves. “Foundational research” is considered reseach not otherwise completed by the scientific community, and is more or less constrained to effective altruism. It can be considered original research in the physical sciences, social sciences, or philosophy.
[4] While not its primary focus, through their workshops CFAR has built an alumni network numbering in the hundreds and constantly growing, the full potential for which both within and outside of effective altruism seems yet untapped. Thus, I consider this an important passive role CFAR plays.
[5] Not the same as “foundational research”. “Original research” constitutes applying existing research methods from other science or scholarship to new topics, such as Charity Science doing fundraising experiments, or 80,000 Hours doing careers impact reseach, which apply methods from social science in new ways.
[6] Organizations which play a role in facilitating or improving the effectiveness of individual effective altruists or other organizations.
Evan, (please say Stefan): nice work! I agree the “meta-level” category is too coarse-grained. At the same time, I also think there’s a risk of becoming too fine-grained. You could have several different level of granularity, but the uppermost one should be relatively coarse-grained I think (perhaps 5-7 categories, but I’m not sure of the exact numbers), since otherwise it gets too hard to remember. Could one turn your six categories into four—movement growth (increased quantity of members), community support (improved productivity of individual members), prioritization and research? They would in turn have different sub-categories. Not quite sure of this proposal though.
It’d be great if you wrote something more systematic on this. Do include a comprehensive discussion of the reasons for your categorization, though. Criteria could include:
1) The categories should be intuitively clear. You don’t want a single category encompassing what is intuitively very different things.
2) Not too many categories at the most coarse-grained level.
3) Each category must denote something sufficiently important. If, e.g. few people are working on a cause, it’s better to define it as a sub-category of another cause area.
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.
Stefan (or, Dr. Schubert? You have a Ph.D., and I don’t know what’s the most appropriate way to address you in this setting), I commented that I think the current definition effective altruism uses for meta-level work is not granular enough, and this likely causes significant problems in our decision-making. I broke this down into “cause prioritization” and “movement growth”. However, you make me realize there needs to be more distinctions than that. Here is my list for dinstinguishing meta-level work in effective altruism[1].
Cause Prioritization: Givewell; Open Philanthropy Project; Global Priorities Project
Charity Prioritization[2]: Givewell; Animal Charity Evaluators; Future of Life Institute
Foundational Research[3]: Foundational Research Institute; Future of Humanity Institute; Leverage Research; Center For Applied Rationality
Community Growth, Development, and Management: Center For Applied Rationality[4]; Giving What We Can; Raising for Effective Giving; The Life You Can Save; Effective Altruism Outreach; Effective Altruism Ventures; Effective Altruism Action; 80,000 Hours
Fundraising and Advocacy: Charity Science; Raising for Effective Giving; The Life You Can Save; Giving What We Can; Effective Altruism Ventures; Centre for Effective Altruism
Original/Applied Research[5]: Center For Applied Rationality; Charity Science; 80,000 Hours
Community Support[6]: CFAR; 80k; CEA; .impact
If you look at all this diversity and how putting all this in one cause makes for strange bedfellows across organizations, I concur with Peter meta-work, while important, isn’t a cause in its own right, and it makes more sense to think of different meta-charities just filling different roles within effective altruism. Some meta-charities are specific to an object-level cause or two, and some are not.
[1] Most meta-charities seem to occupy more than one of these charities.
[2] Prioritizing between charities within a single cause, rather than prioritizing between causes.
[3] Research not specific to a single cause, but aimed at improving decision-making, cause prioritization, and cause selection as processes themselves. “Foundational research” is considered reseach not otherwise completed by the scientific community, and is more or less constrained to effective altruism. It can be considered original research in the physical sciences, social sciences, or philosophy.
[4] While not its primary focus, through their workshops CFAR has built an alumni network numbering in the hundreds and constantly growing, the full potential for which both within and outside of effective altruism seems yet untapped. Thus, I consider this an important passive role CFAR plays.
[5] Not the same as “foundational research”. “Original research” constitutes applying existing research methods from other science or scholarship to new topics, such as Charity Science doing fundraising experiments, or 80,000 Hours doing careers impact reseach, which apply methods from social science in new ways.
[6] Organizations which play a role in facilitating or improving the effectiveness of individual effective altruists or other organizations.
Evan, (please say Stefan): nice work! I agree the “meta-level” category is too coarse-grained. At the same time, I also think there’s a risk of becoming too fine-grained. You could have several different level of granularity, but the uppermost one should be relatively coarse-grained I think (perhaps 5-7 categories, but I’m not sure of the exact numbers), since otherwise it gets too hard to remember. Could one turn your six categories into four—movement growth (increased quantity of members), community support (improved productivity of individual members), prioritization and research? They would in turn have different sub-categories. Not quite sure of this proposal though.
It’d be great if you wrote something more systematic on this. Do include a comprehensive discussion of the reasons for your categorization, though. Criteria could include:
1) The categories should be intuitively clear. You don’t want a single category encompassing what is intuitively very different things. 2) Not too many categories at the most coarse-grained level. 3) Each category must denote something sufficiently important. If, e.g. few people are working on a cause, it’s better to define it as a sub-category of another cause area.
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.