Wow great essay Sarah, very thought-provoking and relevant I thought.
I have lots of things to say, I will split them into separate comments in case you want to reply to specific parts (but feel free to reply to none of it, especially given I see you have a dialogue coming soon). Or we can just discuss it all on our next call :) But I thought I would write them down while I remember.
Re the polio vaccine, I don’t know much about it, but I think the inventors probably do deserve a lot of credit! Yes, lots and lots of people were needed to manufacture and distribute many vaccine doses, but I think the counterfactual is illustrative: the workers driving the trucks and going door to door and so forth seem very replaceable to me and it is hard to imagine a great vaccine being invented, but then not being rolled our because no-one is willing to take a job as a truck driver distributing the doses. Whereas if the inventors didn’t invent it, maybe it would be years or decades before someone else did. But I can think of a case where inventors should get far less credit I think: if there is a huge prize for developing a vaccine, then quite likely lots of teams will try to do it, and if you are the winning team you might have only accelerated it by a few months. So in this case maybe the people who made/funded the prize get a lot of the credit.
I really like your inclusion of people who have influenced us in thinking about how to apportion credit. For me personally, my parents sometimes muse that despite all the great things they have done directly, parenting my brother and I well may be the single biggest ‘impact’ of their lives. Of course it is hard to guess, but this seems at least plausible, and I think parenting (and more broadly supporting/mentoring/caring for other people) is really valuable!
[The thoughts expressed below are tentative and reveal lingering confusion in my own brain. I hope they are somewhat insightful anyways.]
but I think the counterfactual is illustrative
Completely agree! The concept of counterfactual analysis seems super relevant to explaining how and why some of my takes in the original post differ from “the mainstream EA narrative on impact”. I’m still trying to puzzle out exactly how my claims in “The empirical problem” link to the counterfactual analysis point—do I think that my claims are irrelevant to a counterfactual impact analysis? do I, in other words, accept and agree that impact between actions/people differs by several magnitudes when calculated via counterfactual analysis methods? how can I best name, describe, illustrate, and maybe defend the alternative perspective on impact evaluations that seems to inform my thinking in the essay and in general? what role does and should counterfactual analysis play in my thinking alongside that alternative perspective?
To discuss with regards to the polio example: I see the rationale for claiming that the vaccine inventors are somehow more pivotal because they are less easily replaceable than all those people performing supportive and enabling actions. But just because an action is replacement doesn’t mean it’s unimportant. It is a fact that the vaccine discovery could not have happened and would not have had any positive consequences if the supporting & enabling actions had not been performed by somebody. I can’t help myself, but this seems relevant and important when I think about the impact I as an individual can have; on some level, it seems true to say that as an individual, living in a world where everything is embedded in society, I cannot have any meaningful impact on my own; all effects I can bring about will be brought about by myself and many other people; if only I acted, no meaningful effects could possibly occur. Should all of this really just be ignored when thinking about impact evaluations and my personal decisions (as seems to occur in counterfactual analyses)? I don’t know.
I think this is a good framing! And I think I am happy to bite this bullet and say that for the purposes of deciding what to do it matters relatively little whether my action being effective relies on systems of humans acting predictably (like polio vaccine deliverers getting paid to do their job) or natural forces (atmospheric physics for a climate geoengineering intervention). Whereas regarding what is a virtuous attitude to have, yes probably it is good to foreground the many (sometimes small) contributions of other humans that help our actions have their desired impacts.
Finally, I really hope you do choose to stay at least somewhat involved in ~EA things, as you say having the added intellectual diversity is valuable I think. You are probably the sometimes-critic of EA conventions/dogmas whose views I am most moved by.
Thanks a lot for taking the time to read the essay and write up those separate thoughts in response!! I’ll get to the other comments over the next week or so, but for now: thank you for adding that last comment. Though I really (!) am grateful for all the critical and thought-provoking feedback from yourself and others in this comment thread, I can’t deny that reading the appreciative and encouraging lines in that last response is also welcome (and will probably be one of the factors helping me to keep exercising a critical mind even if it feels exhausting/confusing at times) :D
Good to hear! Yes I imagine having 50+ comments, many of them questioning/pushing-back, could be a bit overwhelming, from my perspective and I am guessing for others as well it is fine and reasonable if you choose not to engage now/ever. Putting this essay out into the world has already been a useful contribution to the discourse I think :)
I think elitism and inequality are real worries—I think it is lamentable but probably true that some people’s lives will have far greater instrumental effects on the world than others. (But this doesn’t change their intrinsic worth as an experiencer of emotions and haver of human connections.)
So I agree that there is a danger of thinking too much of oneself as some sort of ubermensch do-gooder, but the question of to what extent impact varies by person or action is separate.
So I agree that there is a danger of thinking too much of oneself as some sort of ubermensch do-gooder, but the question of to what extent impact varies by person or action is separate.
I think that makes sense and is definitely a take that I feel respect (and gratitude/hope) for.
I think it is lamentable but probably true that some people’s lives will have far greater instrumental effects on the world than others.
Even after a week of reflecting on the empirical question—do some people have magnitudes higher impact than others? - and the conceptual question—which impact evaluation framework (counterfactual, Shapley value attribution, something else entirely) should we use to assess levels of impact? -, I remain uncertain and confused on my own beliefs here (see more in my comment on the polio vaccine example above). So I’m not sure what my current response to your claim “[it’s] probably true that some people’s lives will have far greater instrumental effects on the world than others” is or should be.
I do not agree that there are vast differences in value among those actions and strategies that have crossed the bar of having a significant positive impact on the world
(emphasis added)
Perhaps this is a strawman of your position, but it sounds a bit like you want to split actions into basically three buckets: negative, approximately neutral, and significantly positive. This seems unhelpful to me, for several reasons:
I think it is uncontroversial that at least on the negative side of the scale some actions are vastly worse than others, e.g. a mass murder or a military coup of a democratic leader, compared to more ‘everyday’ bads like being a grumpy boss.
It feels pretty hard to know which actions are neutral, for many of the reasons you say that the world is complex and there are lots of flow-through effects and interactions.
Identifying which positive actions are significantly so versus insignificantly so feels like it just loses a lot of information compared to a finer-grained scale.
I think it is uncontroversial that at least on the negative side of the scale some actions are vastly worse than others, e.g. a mass murder or a military coup of a democratic leader, compared to more ‘everyday’ bads like being a grumpy boss.
Agreed! I share the belief that there are huge differences in how bad an action can be and that there’s some relevance in distinguish between very bad and just slightly bad ones. I didn’t think this was important to mention in my post, but if it came across as suggesting that we basically should only think in terms of three buckets, I clearly communicated poorly—I agree that this would be too crude.
It feels pretty hard to know which actions are neutral, for many of the reasons you say that the world is complex and there are lots of flow-through effects and interactions.
Strongly agreed! I strongly share the worry that identifying neutral actions would be extremely hard in practice—took me a while to settle on “bullshit jobs” as a representative example in the original post, and I’m still unsure whether it’s a solid case of “neutral actions”. But I think for me, this uncertainty reinforces the case for more research/thinking to identify actions with significantly positive outcomes vs actions that are basically neutral. I find myself believing that dividing actions into “significantly positive” vs “everything else” is epistemologically more tractable than dividing them into “the very best” vs “everything else”. (I think I’d agree that there is a complementary quest—identifying very bad actions and roughly scoring them on how bad they would be—which is worthwhile pursuing alongside either of the two options mentioned in the last sentence; maybe I should’ve mentioned this in the post?)
Identifying which positive actions are significantly so versus insignificantly so feels like it just loses a lot of information compared to a finer-grained scale.
I think I disagree mostly for epistemological reasons—I don’t think we have much access to that information at a finer-grained scale; based on that, giving up on finding such information wouldn’t be a great loss because there isn’t much to lose in the first place.
I think I might also disagree from a conceptual or strategic standpoint: my thinking on this—especially when it comes to catastrophic risks, maybe a bit less for global health & development / poverty—tends to be more about “what bundle of actions and organisations and people do we need for the world to improve towards a state that is more sustainable and exhibits higher wellbeing (/less suffering)?” For that question, knowing and contributing to significantly good actions seems to be of primary importance, since I believe that we’ll need many of these good actions—not just the very best ones—for eventual success anyways. Since publishing this essay and receiving a few comments defending (or taking for granted) the counterfactual perspective on impact analysis, I’ve come to reconsider whether I should base my thinking on that perspective more often than I currently do. I remain uncertain and undecided on that point for now, but feel relatively confident that I won’t end up concluding that I should pivot to only or primarily using the counterfactual perspective (vs. the “collective rationality / how do I contribute to success at all” perspective)… Curious to hear if all that makes some sense to you (though you might continue to disagree)?
Yes I think that makes sense. I think for me the area where I am most sympathetic to your collective rationality approach is voting, where as you noted elsewhere the 80K narrow consequentialist approach is pretty convoluted. Conversely, the Categorical Imperative, universalisability perspective is very clear that voting is good, and thinking in terms of larger groups and being part of something is perhaps helpful here. So yes while I still generally prefer the counterfactual perspective, I am probably not fully settled there.
I suppose in theory being part of a loose collective like EA focused on impact could mean that individual donation choices matter less if my $X to org Y means someone else will notice Y is better funded and give to a similarly-impressive org Z. I think in practice there is enough heterogeneity incause prioritization this may not be that large an effect? Perhaps within e.g. global health though it could work, where donating directly to any GiveWell top charity is similar to any other as GiveWell might make up the difference.
Footnote 5 predicted perfectly the sort of thing I was going to say in response. You probably know more economics than I do, but I feel like there are some models of how markets work that quite successfully predict macro behaviour of systems without knowing all the local individual factors? E.g. re your suggestion that nurses are a large fraction of the ‘highest impact’ career paths, I think we could run some decent calculations about the elasticity of the nursing labour market to find how many more nurses there will overall be if I decide to be a nurse in some particular place. Me being a nurse increases labour supply, marginally reducing wages in expectation, reducing the number of other people who choose to be nurses; this effect may be quite different in different professions, e.g. if there is a cap of X places in some government medical certification program and lots of people apply, as with medical school in India, then joining that profession may increase the total supply of doctors very little.
So I suppose I am still more optimistic than you that we can make, in some cases, simple models that accurately capture some important features of the world.
I feel like there are some models of how markets work that quite successfully predict macro behaviour of systems without knowing all the local individual factors?
You’re right that you’re more optimistic than me for this one. I don’t think we have good models of that kind in economics (or: I haven’t come across such models; I have tried to look for them a little bit but am far from knowing all modeling attempts that have ever been made, so I might have missed the good/empirically reliable ones).
I do agree that “we can make, in some cases, simple models that accurately capture some important features of the world”—but my sense is that in the social sciences (/ whenever the object of interest is societal or human), the features we are able to capture accurately are only a (small) selection of the ones that are relevant for reasonably assessing something like “my expected impact from taking action X.” And my sense is also that many (certainly not all!) people who like to use models to improve their thinking on the world over-rely on the information they gain from the model and forget that these other, model-external features also exist and are relevant for real-life decision-making.
An overarching thought, not responding to any particular quote from you: I think lots of people in the world (the vast majority in fact!) don’t really think about impartial altrusitic impact, let alone maximising it. If this is right, I think it would be a priori not so surprising if there are lots of high-impact opportunities left on the table by most people, waiting for ~EAs to action. Perhaps the clearest case here is something like shrimp or insect welfare. By some lights at least this is very high impact, but it makes sense it wasn’t already being worked on because primarily only people with an ~EA mindset would be interested in it.
[The thoughts expressed below are tentative and reveal lingering confusion in my own brain. I hope they are somewhat insightful anyways.]
This seems on-point and super sensible as a rough heuristic (not a strict proof) when looking at impact through a counterfactual analysis that focuses mostly on direct effects. But I don’t know if and how it translates to different perspectives of assessing impact. If there never were high impact opportunities in the first place, because impact is dispersed across the many actions needed to bring about desired consequences, then it doesn’t matter whether a lot or only a few people try to grab these opportunities from the table—because there would be nothing to grab in the first place.
Maybe the example helps to explain my thinking here (?): If we believe that shrimp/insect welfare can be improved significantly by targeted interventions that a small set of people push for and implement, then I think your case for it being a high impact opportunity is much more reasonable than if we believe that actual improvements in this area will require a large-scale effort by millions of people (researchers, advocates, implementers, etc). I think most desirable change in the world is closer to the latter category.*
*Kind of undermining myself: I do recognise that this depends on what we “take for granted” and I tentatively accept that there are many concrete decision situations where it makes sense to take more for granted than I am inclined to do (the infrastructure we use for basically everything, many of the implementing and supporting actions needed for an intervention to actually have positive effects, etc), in which case it might be possible to consider more possible positive changes in the world to fall closer to the former category (the former category ~ changes in the world that can be brought about by a small group of individuals).
Yes, I think this issue of how many people you need to get on board with the vision/goals to make some change happen is key (and perhaps a crux). I agree the number of people needed to implement a change might be huge (all the farm workers making changes for various animal welfare things) but think we probably don’t need to get all of them to care a lot more about nonhumans to get the job done. So in my view often a small-ish set of people advocate for/research/fund/plan some big change, and then lots of people implement it because they are told to/paid to.
Wow great essay Sarah, very thought-provoking and relevant I thought.
I have lots of things to say, I will split them into separate comments in case you want to reply to specific parts (but feel free to reply to none of it, especially given I see you have a dialogue coming soon). Or we can just discuss it all on our next call :) But I thought I would write them down while I remember.
Re the polio vaccine, I don’t know much about it, but I think the inventors probably do deserve a lot of credit! Yes, lots and lots of people were needed to manufacture and distribute many vaccine doses, but I think the counterfactual is illustrative: the workers driving the trucks and going door to door and so forth seem very replaceable to me and it is hard to imagine a great vaccine being invented, but then not being rolled our because no-one is willing to take a job as a truck driver distributing the doses. Whereas if the inventors didn’t invent it, maybe it would be years or decades before someone else did. But I can think of a case where inventors should get far less credit I think: if there is a huge prize for developing a vaccine, then quite likely lots of teams will try to do it, and if you are the winning team you might have only accelerated it by a few months. So in this case maybe the people who made/funded the prize get a lot of the credit.
I really like your inclusion of people who have influenced us in thinking about how to apportion credit. For me personally, my parents sometimes muse that despite all the great things they have done directly, parenting my brother and I well may be the single biggest ‘impact’ of their lives. Of course it is hard to guess, but this seems at least plausible, and I think parenting (and more broadly supporting/mentoring/caring for other people) is really valuable!
[The thoughts expressed below are tentative and reveal lingering confusion in my own brain. I hope they are somewhat insightful anyways.]
Completely agree! The concept of counterfactual analysis seems super relevant to explaining how and why some of my takes in the original post differ from “the mainstream EA narrative on impact”. I’m still trying to puzzle out exactly how my claims in “The empirical problem” link to the counterfactual analysis point—do I think that my claims are irrelevant to a counterfactual impact analysis? do I, in other words, accept and agree that impact between actions/people differs by several magnitudes when calculated via counterfactual analysis methods? how can I best name, describe, illustrate, and maybe defend the alternative perspective on impact evaluations that seems to inform my thinking in the essay and in general? what role does and should counterfactual analysis play in my thinking alongside that alternative perspective?
To discuss with regards to the polio example: I see the rationale for claiming that the vaccine inventors are somehow more pivotal because they are less easily replaceable than all those people performing supportive and enabling actions. But just because an action is replacement doesn’t mean it’s unimportant. It is a fact that the vaccine discovery could not have happened and would not have had any positive consequences if the supporting & enabling actions had not been performed by somebody. I can’t help myself, but this seems relevant and important when I think about the impact I as an individual can have; on some level, it seems true to say that as an individual, living in a world where everything is embedded in society, I cannot have any meaningful impact on my own; all effects I can bring about will be brought about by myself and many other people; if only I acted, no meaningful effects could possibly occur. Should all of this really just be ignored when thinking about impact evaluations and my personal decisions (as seems to occur in counterfactual analyses)? I don’t know.
I think this is a good framing! And I think I am happy to bite this bullet and say that for the purposes of deciding what to do it matters relatively little whether my action being effective relies on systems of humans acting predictably (like polio vaccine deliverers getting paid to do their job) or natural forces (atmospheric physics for a climate geoengineering intervention). Whereas regarding what is a virtuous attitude to have, yes probably it is good to foreground the many (sometimes small) contributions of other humans that help our actions have their desired impacts.
Finally, I really hope you do choose to stay at least somewhat involved in ~EA things, as you say having the added intellectual diversity is valuable I think. You are probably the sometimes-critic of EA conventions/dogmas whose views I am most moved by.
Thanks a lot for taking the time to read the essay and write up those separate thoughts in response!! I’ll get to the other comments over the next week or so, but for now: thank you for adding that last comment. Though I really (!) am grateful for all the critical and thought-provoking feedback from yourself and others in this comment thread, I can’t deny that reading the appreciative and encouraging lines in that last response is also welcome (and will probably be one of the factors helping me to keep exercising a critical mind even if it feels exhausting/confusing at times) :D
Good to hear! Yes I imagine having 50+ comments, many of them questioning/pushing-back, could be a bit overwhelming, from my perspective and I am guessing for others as well it is fine and reasonable if you choose not to engage now/ever. Putting this essay out into the world has already been a useful contribution to the discourse I think :)
I think elitism and inequality are real worries—I think it is lamentable but probably true that some people’s lives will have far greater instrumental effects on the world than others. (But this doesn’t change their intrinsic worth as an experiencer of emotions and haver of human connections.)
So I agree that there is a danger of thinking too much of oneself as some sort of ubermensch do-gooder, but the question of to what extent impact varies by person or action is separate.
I think that makes sense and is definitely a take that I feel respect (and gratitude/hope) for.
Even after a week of reflecting on the empirical question—do some people have magnitudes higher impact than others? - and the conceptual question—which impact evaluation framework (counterfactual, Shapley value attribution, something else entirely) should we use to assess levels of impact? -, I remain uncertain and confused on my own beliefs here (see more in my comment on the polio vaccine example above). So I’m not sure what my current response to your claim “[it’s] probably true that some people’s lives will have far greater instrumental effects on the world than others” is or should be.
(emphasis added)
Perhaps this is a strawman of your position, but it sounds a bit like you want to split actions into basically three buckets: negative, approximately neutral, and significantly positive. This seems unhelpful to me, for several reasons:
I think it is uncontroversial that at least on the negative side of the scale some actions are vastly worse than others, e.g. a mass murder or a military coup of a democratic leader, compared to more ‘everyday’ bads like being a grumpy boss.
It feels pretty hard to know which actions are neutral, for many of the reasons you say that the world is complex and there are lots of flow-through effects and interactions.
Identifying which positive actions are significantly so versus insignificantly so feels like it just loses a lot of information compared to a finer-grained scale.
Agreed! I share the belief that there are huge differences in how bad an action can be and that there’s some relevance in distinguish between very bad and just slightly bad ones. I didn’t think this was important to mention in my post, but if it came across as suggesting that we basically should only think in terms of three buckets, I clearly communicated poorly—I agree that this would be too crude.
Strongly agreed! I strongly share the worry that identifying neutral actions would be extremely hard in practice—took me a while to settle on “bullshit jobs” as a representative example in the original post, and I’m still unsure whether it’s a solid case of “neutral actions”. But I think for me, this uncertainty reinforces the case for more research/thinking to identify actions with significantly positive outcomes vs actions that are basically neutral. I find myself believing that dividing actions into “significantly positive” vs “everything else” is epistemologically more tractable than dividing them into “the very best” vs “everything else”. (I think I’d agree that there is a complementary quest—identifying very bad actions and roughly scoring them on how bad they would be—which is worthwhile pursuing alongside either of the two options mentioned in the last sentence; maybe I should’ve mentioned this in the post?)
I think I disagree mostly for epistemological reasons—I don’t think we have much access to that information at a finer-grained scale; based on that, giving up on finding such information wouldn’t be a great loss because there isn’t much to lose in the first place.
I think I might also disagree from a conceptual or strategic standpoint: my thinking on this—especially when it comes to catastrophic risks, maybe a bit less for global health & development / poverty—tends to be more about “what bundle of actions and organisations and people do we need for the world to improve towards a state that is more sustainable and exhibits higher wellbeing (/less suffering)?” For that question, knowing and contributing to significantly good actions seems to be of primary importance, since I believe that we’ll need many of these good actions—not just the very best ones—for eventual success anyways. Since publishing this essay and receiving a few comments defending (or taking for granted) the counterfactual perspective on impact analysis, I’ve come to reconsider whether I should base my thinking on that perspective more often than I currently do. I remain uncertain and undecided on that point for now, but feel relatively confident that I won’t end up concluding that I should pivot to only or primarily using the counterfactual perspective (vs. the “collective rationality / how do I contribute to success at all” perspective)… Curious to hear if all that makes some sense to you (though you might continue to disagree)?
Yes I think that makes sense. I think for me the area where I am most sympathetic to your collective rationality approach is voting, where as you noted elsewhere the 80K narrow consequentialist approach is pretty convoluted. Conversely, the Categorical Imperative, universalisability perspective is very clear that voting is good, and thinking in terms of larger groups and being part of something is perhaps helpful here. So yes while I still generally prefer the counterfactual perspective, I am probably not fully settled there.
I suppose in theory being part of a loose collective like EA focused on impact could mean that individual donation choices matter less if my $X to org Y means someone else will notice Y is better funded and give to a similarly-impressive org Z. I think in practice there is enough heterogeneity incause prioritization this may not be that large an effect? Perhaps within e.g. global health though it could work, where donating directly to any GiveWell top charity is similar to any other as GiveWell might make up the difference.
Footnote 5 predicted perfectly the sort of thing I was going to say in response. You probably know more economics than I do, but I feel like there are some models of how markets work that quite successfully predict macro behaviour of systems without knowing all the local individual factors? E.g. re your suggestion that nurses are a large fraction of the ‘highest impact’ career paths, I think we could run some decent calculations about the elasticity of the nursing labour market to find how many more nurses there will overall be if I decide to be a nurse in some particular place. Me being a nurse increases labour supply, marginally reducing wages in expectation, reducing the number of other people who choose to be nurses; this effect may be quite different in different professions, e.g. if there is a cap of X places in some government medical certification program and lots of people apply, as with medical school in India, then joining that profession may increase the total supply of doctors very little.
So I suppose I am still more optimistic than you that we can make, in some cases, simple models that accurately capture some important features of the world.
You’re right that you’re more optimistic than me for this one. I don’t think we have good models of that kind in economics (or: I haven’t come across such models; I have tried to look for them a little bit but am far from knowing all modeling attempts that have ever been made, so I might have missed the good/empirically reliable ones).
I do agree that “we can make, in some cases, simple models that accurately capture some important features of the world”—but my sense is that in the social sciences (/ whenever the object of interest is societal or human), the features we are able to capture accurately are only a (small) selection of the ones that are relevant for reasonably assessing something like “my expected impact from taking action X.” And my sense is also that many (certainly not all!) people who like to use models to improve their thinking on the world over-rely on the information they gain from the model and forget that these other, model-external features also exist and are relevant for real-life decision-making.
Makes sense, I think I don’t know enough to continue this line of reasoning that sensibly!
An overarching thought, not responding to any particular quote from you: I think lots of people in the world (the vast majority in fact!) don’t really think about impartial altrusitic impact, let alone maximising it. If this is right, I think it would be a priori not so surprising if there are lots of high-impact opportunities left on the table by most people, waiting for ~EAs to action. Perhaps the clearest case here is something like shrimp or insect welfare. By some lights at least this is very high impact, but it makes sense it wasn’t already being worked on because primarily only people with an ~EA mindset would be interested in it.
[The thoughts expressed below are tentative and reveal lingering confusion in my own brain. I hope they are somewhat insightful anyways.]
This seems on-point and super sensible as a rough heuristic (not a strict proof) when looking at impact through a counterfactual analysis that focuses mostly on direct effects. But I don’t know if and how it translates to different perspectives of assessing impact. If there never were high impact opportunities in the first place, because impact is dispersed across the many actions needed to bring about desired consequences, then it doesn’t matter whether a lot or only a few people try to grab these opportunities from the table—because there would be nothing to grab in the first place.
Maybe the example helps to explain my thinking here (?): If we believe that shrimp/insect welfare can be improved significantly by targeted interventions that a small set of people push for and implement, then I think your case for it being a high impact opportunity is much more reasonable than if we believe that actual improvements in this area will require a large-scale effort by millions of people (researchers, advocates, implementers, etc). I think most desirable change in the world is closer to the latter category.*
*Kind of undermining myself: I do recognise that this depends on what we “take for granted” and I tentatively accept that there are many concrete decision situations where it makes sense to take more for granted than I am inclined to do (the infrastructure we use for basically everything, many of the implementing and supporting actions needed for an intervention to actually have positive effects, etc), in which case it might be possible to consider more possible positive changes in the world to fall closer to the former category (the former category ~ changes in the world that can be brought about by a small group of individuals).
Yes, I think this issue of how many people you need to get on board with the vision/goals to make some change happen is key (and perhaps a crux). I agree the number of people needed to implement a change might be huge (all the farm workers making changes for various animal welfare things) but think we probably don’t need to get all of them to care a lot more about nonhumans to get the job done. So in my view often a small-ish set of people advocate for/research/fund/plan some big change, and then lots of people implement it because they are told to/paid to.