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.
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.