My rough sense is that one reason for EA’s historical lack of focus on systemic change is that it’s really hard to convert money to systemic change (difficult to measure effectiveness, hard to coördinate on optimal approach, etc.). On the other hand, I do think that this leads to an undervaluing of careers that work in systemic change (and important considerations that cross cause areas, since they’re also hard to donate to). This might not be true if you have AI timelines too short for systemic changes to come into being.
Not super confident about this, though. Feel free to try to change my mind.
I like your point about careers and systemic change, and that it is harder to convert money directly into results. I also agree with @jackva though that measurement problems aren’t a likely reason for the lack of investment, Open Phil are investing in lots of speculative and almost impossible to measure things, I don’t think that’s the issue.
Thanks! I don’t think that hard-to-measure explanation is quite right—lots of other similarly speculative / hard-to-measure interventions that EAs have been traditionally very excited about.
I think it has more to do with priors of low neglectedness and low tractability and a certain aversion to act in ways that could be seen as political.
That said, my goal here is not to re-litigate the whole “surgical v systemic change” debate, but rather to say that current changes seem to suggest that systemic work should be relatively more important and it’s something that seems (vastly) under-discussed and not systemically explored.
My rough sense is that one reason for EA’s historical lack of focus on systemic change is that it’s really hard to convert money to systemic change (difficult to measure effectiveness, hard to coördinate on optimal approach, etc.). On the other hand, I do think that this leads to an undervaluing of careers that work in systemic change (and important considerations that cross cause areas, since they’re also hard to donate to). This might not be true if you have AI timelines too short for systemic changes to come into being.
Not super confident about this, though. Feel free to try to change my mind.
I like your point about careers and systemic change, and that it is harder to convert money directly into results. I also agree with @jackva though that measurement problems aren’t a likely reason for the lack of investment, Open Phil are investing in lots of speculative and almost impossible to measure things, I don’t think that’s the issue.
Thanks! I don’t think that hard-to-measure explanation is quite right—lots of other similarly speculative / hard-to-measure interventions that EAs have been traditionally very excited about.
I think it has more to do with priors of low neglectedness and low tractability and a certain aversion to act in ways that could be seen as political.
That said, my goal here is not to re-litigate the whole “surgical v systemic change” debate, but rather to say that current changes seem to suggest that systemic work should be relatively more important and it’s something that seems (vastly) under-discussed and not systemically explored.