ank you for this post—it looks very interesting. I’ve given it a quick skim but wanted to check in on a concern/critique I have before engaging more closely with the recommendations.
Most of the post seems dedicated to explaining why the Fabians were so successful.
However, I’m not yet convinced that they actually caused meaningful change. You begin by listing some of their goals and then highlight how many of those goals came to fruition, but that doesn’t establish their causal role in making those changes happen.
It looks like you provide two main forms of evidence for their influence:
1. Noting that they had influential members or supporters in many countries.
2. Quoting a particular supporter of the Fabians.
Unfortunately, both of these seem like weak evidence to me. The first point is fairly common—many people sign up for societies and pay lip service to their supposed importance without necessarily contributing to their impact. For example, PlayPumps (a classic Effective Altruist case of an ineffective and even counterproductive yet widely endorsed charity) had many influential supporters, but that didn’t make it effective or significant.
As for the Margaret Cole quote, it doesn’t provide much evidence either—it’s essentially just an endorsement, asserting that the Fabians were important without substantiating that claim?
To be clear, I’m not saying you’re wrong about the Fabians being influential. Rather, I think the post hasn’t yet provided strong evidence for that claim. If you were to include more comprehensive or compelling evidence, this could be a really valuable post.
Thanks a lot for your work here!
(Apologies if this seems pedantic. I think these methodological considerations are important for the effort to learn useful lessons from history though. See these posts I wrote for some related thoughts)
Thank you for reading my post and for the thoughtful comment — and for the links to the Sentience Institute methodology, which I found genuinely interesting.
The goal of my post was to draw lessons for the EA community from the Fabians’ approach, not to provide a rigorous causal analysis of their impact — which would require considerably more space and evidence than a forum post allows. That said, I do think however the evidence for Fabian influence goes well beyond the two points you mentioned. The historical literature — Margaret Cole’s The Story of Fabian Socialism, Edward Pease’s History of the Fabian Society, and several academic assessments — document specific causal pathways, such as for example the Fabians’ direct role in drafting the Labour Party’s 1918 constitution, their documented influence on the Education Act of 1902 (passed by a Conservative government), the institutional legacy of the LSE in training generations of policymakers and researchers. These are examples of traceable policy influence.
Establishing rigorous causal attribution for social change is inherently difficult — as your own methodology work discusses so well. My post would have certainly benefited from foregrounding these specific causal pathways more clearly rather than relying primarily on references to the existing literature made in my post: - Pease, - Cole, - MacDonald in the Journal of Politics, - Poirier in Political Science Quarterly, - Scott Alexander’s post.
If I revisit this topic, I’ll aim to incorporate that kind of evidence more explicitly. Thank you for pushing the analysis to be stronger — that’s what makes the Forum valuable.
ank you for this post—it looks very interesting. I’ve given it a quick skim but wanted to check in on a concern/critique I have before engaging more closely with the recommendations.
Most of the post seems dedicated to explaining why the Fabians were so successful.
However, I’m not yet convinced that they actually caused meaningful change. You begin by listing some of their goals and then highlight how many of those goals came to fruition, but that doesn’t establish their causal role in making those changes happen.
It looks like you provide two main forms of evidence for their influence:
1. Noting that they had influential members or supporters in many countries.
2. Quoting a particular supporter of the Fabians.
Unfortunately, both of these seem like weak evidence to me. The first point is fairly common—many people sign up for societies and pay lip service to their supposed importance without necessarily contributing to their impact. For example, PlayPumps (a classic Effective Altruist case of an ineffective and even counterproductive yet widely endorsed charity) had many influential supporters, but that didn’t make it effective or significant.
As for the Margaret Cole quote, it doesn’t provide much evidence either—it’s essentially just an endorsement, asserting that the Fabians were important without substantiating that claim?
To be clear, I’m not saying you’re wrong about the Fabians being influential. Rather, I think the post hasn’t yet provided strong evidence for that claim. If you were to include more comprehensive or compelling evidence, this could be a really valuable post.
Thanks a lot for your work here!
(Apologies if this seems pedantic. I think these methodological considerations are important for the effort to learn useful lessons from history though. See these posts I wrote for some related thoughts)
https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/blog/what-can-the-farmed-animal-movement-learn-from-history
https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/blog/social-movement-case-studies-methodology )
Thank you for reading my post and for the thoughtful comment — and for the links to the Sentience Institute methodology, which I found genuinely interesting.
The goal of my post was to draw lessons for the EA community from the Fabians’ approach, not to provide a rigorous causal analysis of their impact — which would require considerably more space and evidence than a forum post allows. That said, I do think however the evidence for Fabian influence goes well beyond the two points you mentioned. The historical literature — Margaret Cole’s The Story of Fabian Socialism, Edward Pease’s History of the Fabian Society, and several academic assessments — document specific causal pathways, such as for example the Fabians’ direct role in drafting the Labour Party’s 1918 constitution, their documented influence on the Education Act of 1902 (passed by a Conservative government), the institutional legacy of the LSE in training generations of policymakers and researchers. These are examples of traceable policy influence.
Establishing rigorous causal attribution for social change is inherently difficult — as your own methodology work discusses so well. My post would have certainly benefited from foregrounding these specific causal pathways more clearly rather than relying primarily on references to the existing literature made in my post:
- Pease,
- Cole,
- MacDonald in the Journal of Politics,
- Poirier in Political Science Quarterly,
- Scott Alexander’s post.
If I revisit this topic, I’ll aim to incorporate that kind of evidence more explicitly. Thank you for pushing the analysis to be stronger — that’s what makes the Forum valuable.