While Moral Ambition incorporates many EA principles, it steers readers toward its own School of Moral Ambition rather than EA organizations. For instance, 80,000 Hours—a natural fit for this topic—gets just a single footnote. This contrasts with EA’s collaborative spirit, where mutual recommendation and shared resources are the norm.
This makes sense to me, though, based on what Bregman is likely trying to accomplish here. [Caveat: I haven’t read the book as I only read English.]
In the world of doing good effectively (“DGE”), we can think of EA as something like a planet. It metaphorically has enough mass to create a round shape due to its gravity, and has cleared its orbit of smaller objects. It’s big enough, and too dependent on outside forces for its funding or other critical elements. The cynical rough analogy—which I do notfully endorse—would be that Open Phil is the planet, and various other orgs are—in a gravitational sense—satellites of Open Phil to a considerable extent. By that I mean that they lack practical independence from their predominant funder and are rather suspectable to changes in its thinking.
Assuming Bregman has important philosophical differences from Open Phil and/or the EA ecosystem, he probably doesn’t want to create a satellite of the EA / Open Phil planetary system. That could be for philosophical reasons (e.g., a more neartermist approach vs. believing Open Phil is likely to move increasingly longtermist over time) or for practical reasons (e.g., trying to reach people and tap resources not practically available to EA for optics or cultural reasons). When and if SMA gets larger, it may be in a position to interface with EA on a planet-to-planet basis the way GiveWell can now. I doubt it could do so now.
No community can be all things to all people, and besides redundancy limits the risks of single points of failure. SMA may be intended as a somewhat more populist / accessible, somewhat more “vanilla” flavor of DGE than the EA community, and I don’t think it could accomplish those ends very well as an EA satellite. Although there are tradeoffs, I think it’s probably good on balance to have a few more planetary systems in the DGE star system.
This makes sense to me, though, based on what Bregman is likely trying to accomplish here. [Caveat: I haven’t read the book as I only read English.]
In the world of doing good effectively (“DGE”), we can think of EA as something like a planet. It metaphorically has enough mass to create a round shape due to its gravity, and has cleared its orbit of smaller objects. It’s big enough, and too dependent on outside forces for its funding or other critical elements. The cynical rough analogy—which I do not fully endorse—would be that Open Phil is the planet, and various other orgs are—in a gravitational sense—satellites of Open Phil to a considerable extent. By that I mean that they lack practical independence from their predominant funder and are rather suspectable to changes in its thinking.
Assuming Bregman has important philosophical differences from Open Phil and/or the EA ecosystem, he probably doesn’t want to create a satellite of the EA / Open Phil planetary system. That could be for philosophical reasons (e.g., a more neartermist approach vs. believing Open Phil is likely to move increasingly longtermist over time) or for practical reasons (e.g., trying to reach people and tap resources not practically available to EA for optics or cultural reasons). When and if SMA gets larger, it may be in a position to interface with EA on a planet-to-planet basis the way GiveWell can now. I doubt it could do so now.
No community can be all things to all people, and besides redundancy limits the risks of single points of failure. SMA may be intended as a somewhat more populist / accessible, somewhat more “vanilla” flavor of DGE than the EA community, and I don’t think it could accomplish those ends very well as an EA satellite. Although there are tradeoffs, I think it’s probably good on balance to have a few more planetary systems in the DGE star system.