One minor clarification (that I guess you are taking as âgivenâ for this audience, but doesnât hurt to make explicit) is that the kind of âWithin-Cause Prioritizationâ found within EA is very different from that found elsewhere, insofar as it is still done in service of the ultimate goal of âcross-cause prioritizationâ. This jumped out at me when reading the following sentence:
A quick reading of EA history suggests that when the movement was born, it focused primarily on identifying the most cost-effective interventions within pre-existing cause-specific areas (e.g. the early work of GiveWell and Giving What We Can)
I think an important part of the story here is that early GiveWell (et al.) found that a lot of âstandardâ charitable cause areas (e.g. education) didnât look to be very promising given the available evidence. So they actually started with a kind of âcause prioritizationâ, and simply very quickly settled on global poverty as the most promising area. This was maybe too quick, as later expansions into animal welfare and x-risk suggest. But itâs still very different from the standard (non-EA) attitude of âdifferent cause areas are incommensurable; just try to find the best charity within whatever area you happen to be personally passionate about, and donât care about how it would compare to competing cause areas.â
That said, I agree with your general lesson that both broad cause prioritization and specific cross-cause prioritization plausibly still warrant more attention than theyâre currently getting!
Thanks for your comment Richard, I think the discussion is better for it. I agree with your clarification that there are key differences that distinguish EA from more traditional attitudes and that defending cause incommensurability and personal taste are two relevant dimensions.
Like you, it does seem to us that in the early days of EA, many people doing prioritisation of GHD interventions went beyond traditional intervention clusters (e.g. education) and did some cross-cause prioritisation (identifying the best interventions simpliciter).
That said, the times feel different now and we think that, increasingly, people are doing within-cause prioritisation by only trying to identify the best interventions within a given area without it being clearly âdone in service of the ultimate goal of âcross-cause prioritizationââ (e.g. because they are working for an institution or project with funds dedicated exclusively to be allocated within a certain cause).
This is great!
One minor clarification (that I guess you are taking as âgivenâ for this audience, but doesnât hurt to make explicit) is that the kind of âWithin-Cause Prioritizationâ found within EA is very different from that found elsewhere, insofar as it is still done in service of the ultimate goal of âcross-cause prioritizationâ. This jumped out at me when reading the following sentence:
I think an important part of the story here is that early GiveWell (et al.) found that a lot of âstandardâ charitable cause areas (e.g. education) didnât look to be very promising given the available evidence. So they actually started with a kind of âcause prioritizationâ, and simply very quickly settled on global poverty as the most promising area. This was maybe too quick, as later expansions into animal welfare and x-risk suggest. But itâs still very different from the standard (non-EA) attitude of âdifferent cause areas are incommensurable; just try to find the best charity within whatever area you happen to be personally passionate about, and donât care about how it would compare to competing cause areas.â
That said, I agree with your general lesson that both broad cause prioritization and specific cross-cause prioritization plausibly still warrant more attention than theyâre currently getting!
Thanks for your comment Richard, I think the discussion is better for it. I agree with your clarification that there are key differences that distinguish EA from more traditional attitudes and that defending cause incommensurability and personal taste are two relevant dimensions.
Like you, it does seem to us that in the early days of EA, many people doing prioritisation of GHD interventions went beyond traditional intervention clusters (e.g. education) and did some cross-cause prioritisation (identifying the best interventions simpliciter).
That said, the times feel different now and we think that, increasingly, people are doing within-cause prioritisation by only trying to identify the best interventions within a given area without it being clearly âdone in service of the ultimate goal of âcross-cause prioritizationââ (e.g. because they are working for an institution or project with funds dedicated exclusively to be allocated within a certain cause).