I love this post. In the past week I have had a few eye-opening moments which strongly support this way of thinking:
1. I was speaking to a junior EU official, like under 30, less than 3 years in his role. He mentioned that people underestimate the influence people at his level can have in a big organisation. We all know that it is the politicians and very senior officials who decide the budget for important interventions, anything from Developmental Aid to AI Safety. What we often overlook is that it’s often very junior people who execute these instructions, and this often means that they get to decide (or at least suggest) how the money the politicians have approved should be spent at a granular level. People who take the time to learn about this process and then look for the appropriate roles can find themselves deciding which charity should get millions of euros, or which initiative to support. People put massive effort into debating policy (how big is the budget) and in this arena, we tend to have very little influence against all the big players. But if we were to focus on how specifically a part of the budget is spent (e.g. ensuring it supports evidence-based, effective interventions), we could have much more impact. And yet, very few of us do this.
2. I’ve been following Rutger Bregman for a while now, and one of the things he keeps emphasising is the importance of actually doing something tangible. I also read the following provocative quote from Cate Hall (Useful Fictions) : “Ideas are cheap and easy to find; execution is everything. Effective altruists would be a lot more effective if they internalized this.” When we do tangible things, we tend to need tangible, boring skill-sets. The ability to parse long legal documents or study financial spread-sheets. A deep understanding of arcane areas of law and precedent—e.g. tax-law, liability law as it relates to tobacco companies, etc. for two of Rutger’s initiatives. We all have great theories about how the world should be and those are important visions to keep in mind, but it isn’t for the want of these visions that progress is so slow.
People who work in politics already understand this. The movements which succeed don’t just have big visions, they also have thousands of volunteers who study the precise rules of vote-counting, who look at the logistics of getting their voters to the polling stations, who (if they’re in the GOP anyway) look for rules that might enable them to prevent likely opponents from voting or even from running as candidates. The boring tedious stuff.
How much of the tragedy of the past 25 years would have been avoided if some Democrat 2000 had spent a few hours studying the legal details of hanging chads and found a way to just count those votes before the whole drama even started? If someone had done that, we would never have known their name or what they did, nobody would write poems about them, but they might have prevented multiple wars and millions of deaths.
I love this post. In the past week I have had a few eye-opening moments which strongly support this way of thinking:
1. I was speaking to a junior EU official, like under 30, less than 3 years in his role. He mentioned that people underestimate the influence people at his level can have in a big organisation. We all know that it is the politicians and very senior officials who decide the budget for important interventions, anything from Developmental Aid to AI Safety. What we often overlook is that it’s often very junior people who execute these instructions, and this often means that they get to decide (or at least suggest) how the money the politicians have approved should be spent at a granular level. People who take the time to learn about this process and then look for the appropriate roles can find themselves deciding which charity should get millions of euros, or which initiative to support. People put massive effort into debating policy (how big is the budget) and in this arena, we tend to have very little influence against all the big players. But if we were to focus on how specifically a part of the budget is spent (e.g. ensuring it supports evidence-based, effective interventions), we could have much more impact. And yet, very few of us do this.
2. I’ve been following Rutger Bregman for a while now, and one of the things he keeps emphasising is the importance of actually doing something tangible. I also read the following provocative quote from Cate Hall (Useful Fictions) : “Ideas are cheap and easy to find; execution is everything. Effective altruists would be a lot more effective if they internalized this.”
When we do tangible things, we tend to need tangible, boring skill-sets. The ability to parse long legal documents or study financial spread-sheets. A deep understanding of arcane areas of law and precedent—e.g. tax-law, liability law as it relates to tobacco companies, etc. for two of Rutger’s initiatives. We all have great theories about how the world should be and those are important visions to keep in mind, but it isn’t for the want of these visions that progress is so slow.
People who work in politics already understand this. The movements which succeed don’t just have big visions, they also have thousands of volunteers who study the precise rules of vote-counting, who look at the logistics of getting their voters to the polling stations, who (if they’re in the GOP anyway) look for rules that might enable them to prevent likely opponents from voting or even from running as candidates. The boring tedious stuff.
How much of the tragedy of the past 25 years would have been avoided if some Democrat 2000 had spent a few hours studying the legal details of hanging chads and found a way to just count those votes before the whole drama even started? If someone had done that, we would never have known their name or what they did, nobody would write poems about them, but they might have prevented multiple wars and millions of deaths.