I understand the post’s claim to be as follows. Broadly speaking, EAs go for global health and development if they want to help people through rigorously prevent interventions. They go for improving the long-term future stuff if they want to maximize expected value. And they go for farmed animal welfare if they care a lot about animals, but the injustice of factory farming is a major motivation for why many EAs care about it. This makes a lot of sense to me and I wholeheartedly agree.
That said, I think the selection of the main three cause areas – global health and development, farmed animal welfare, and existential risk reduction – is largely a product of the history of EA. Global poverty and factory farming are from Peter Singer, evidence-based global health charities are from GiveWell, and existential risk reduction is from Bostrom and Yudkowsky. (That’s my guess, anyway.) Climate change mitigation manages to be considerably less popular, even though it’s much more popular among the general population and seems roughly at least as cost-effective as global poverty interventions. The mental health charities found by Founders Pledge and Happier Lives Institute seem pretty good to me, but since mental health is a newer field of study within EA, it hasn’t had time to percolate throughout the community. Though EA philosophers have spent quite some time fleshing out the ideas of longtermism, many longtermist interventions besides extinction risk reduction remain under-explored.
This is a good summary of my position. I also agree that a significant part of the reason for the three major cause areas is history, but think that this answers a slightly different question from the one I’m approaching. It’s not surprising, from the outside, that people who want to good, and have interests in common with major figures like Peter Singer, are more likely to get heavily involved with the EA movement than people who want to do good and have other values/interests. However, from the inside it doesn’t give an account of why the people who do wind up involved with EA find the issue personally important, certainly the answer is unlikely to be “because it is important to Peter Singer”. I’d count myself in this category, of people who share values with major figures in the movement, were in part selected for by the movement on this basis, and also, personally, care a very great deal about factory farming, more so that even cause areas I think might be more important from an EV perspective. This is as much an account of my own feelings that I think applies to others as anything else.
This thread gets at some part of the crux of the matter—but doesn’t illuminate it completely.
As a moral philosopher, Peter Singer would have a hard time being taken seriously were he not vegetarian/vegan: too many people live in this world without consuming animals—and, culturally, there is little to sustain the practice aside from norms (most of which are quite far from any economic defensibility, to say nothing of their non-secular roots). Indeed (per the original posting’s conclusion), such a Peter Singer would have a hard time taking himself seriously—because he descends from a long line of moral philosophers (and, indeed, activists) who have all recognized the very same truth—and can see how it manifests in their world. One could suspect folks who align with EA feel much the same, i.e. that being true (perhaps just) to one’s own self is the ticket.
I understand the post’s claim to be as follows. Broadly speaking, EAs go for global health and development if they want to help people through rigorously prevent interventions. They go for improving the long-term future stuff if they want to maximize expected value. And they go for farmed animal welfare if they care a lot about animals, but the injustice of factory farming is a major motivation for why many EAs care about it. This makes a lot of sense to me and I wholeheartedly agree.
That said, I think the selection of the main three cause areas – global health and development, farmed animal welfare, and existential risk reduction – is largely a product of the history of EA. Global poverty and factory farming are from Peter Singer, evidence-based global health charities are from GiveWell, and existential risk reduction is from Bostrom and Yudkowsky. (That’s my guess, anyway.) Climate change mitigation manages to be considerably less popular, even though it’s much more popular among the general population and seems roughly at least as cost-effective as global poverty interventions. The mental health charities found by Founders Pledge and Happier Lives Institute seem pretty good to me, but since mental health is a newer field of study within EA, it hasn’t had time to percolate throughout the community. Though EA philosophers have spent quite some time fleshing out the ideas of longtermism, many longtermist interventions besides extinction risk reduction remain under-explored.
This is a good summary of my position. I also agree that a significant part of the reason for the three major cause areas is history, but think that this answers a slightly different question from the one I’m approaching. It’s not surprising, from the outside, that people who want to good, and have interests in common with major figures like Peter Singer, are more likely to get heavily involved with the EA movement than people who want to do good and have other values/interests. However, from the inside it doesn’t give an account of why the people who do wind up involved with EA find the issue personally important, certainly the answer is unlikely to be “because it is important to Peter Singer”. I’d count myself in this category, of people who share values with major figures in the movement, were in part selected for by the movement on this basis, and also, personally, care a very great deal about factory farming, more so that even cause areas I think might be more important from an EV perspective. This is as much an account of my own feelings that I think applies to others as anything else.
This thread gets at some part of the crux of the matter—but doesn’t illuminate it completely.
As a moral philosopher, Peter Singer would have a hard time being taken seriously were he not vegetarian/vegan: too many people live in this world without consuming animals—and, culturally, there is little to sustain the practice aside from norms (most of which are quite far from any economic defensibility, to say nothing of their non-secular roots). Indeed (per the original posting’s conclusion), such a Peter Singer would have a hard time taking himself seriously—because he descends from a long line of moral philosophers (and, indeed, activists) who have all recognized the very same truth—and can see how it manifests in their world. One could suspect folks who align with EA feel much the same, i.e. that being true (perhaps just) to one’s own self is the ticket.