I agree with your points about there being disagreement about EA, but I don’t think that they fully explain why people didn’t come up with it earlier.
I think that there are two things going on here—one is that the idea of thinking critically about how to improve other people’s lives without much consideration of who they are or where they live and then doing the result of that thinking isn’t actually new, and the other is that the particular style in which the EA community pursues that idea (looking for interventions with robust academic evidence of efficacy, and then supporting organizations implementing those interventions that accountably have a high amount of intervention per marginal dollar) is novel, but mostly because the cultural background for it seeming possible as an option at all is new.
To the first point, I’ll just list Ethical Culture, the Methodists, John Stuart Mill’s involvement with the East India Company, communists, Jesuits, and maybe some empires. I could go into more detail, but doing so would require more research than I want to do tonight.
To the second point, I don’t think that anything resembling modern academic social science existed until relatively recently (around the 1890s?), and so prior to that there was nothing resembling peer-reviewed academic evidence about the efficacy of an intervention.
Giving them time to develop methods and be interrupted by two world wars, we would find that “evidence” was not actually developed until fairly recently, and that prior to that people had reasons for thinking that their ideas are likely to work (and maybe even be the most effective plans), but that those reasons would not constitute well-supported evidence in the sense used by the current EA community.
Also the internet makes it much easier for people with relatively rare opinions to find each other, and enables much more transparency much more easily than was possible prior to it.
the other is that the particular style in which the EA community pursues that idea (looking for interventions with robust academic evidence of efficacy, and then supporting organizations implementing those interventions that accountably have a high amount of intervention per marginal dollar) is novel, but mostly because the cultural background for it seeming possible as an option at all is new.
The kinds of evidence available for some EA interventions, e.g. existential risk ones, doesn’t seem different in kind to the evidence probably available earlier in history. Even in the best cases, EAs often have to lean on a combination of more rigorous evidence and some not very rigorous or evidenced guesses about how indirect effects work out etc. So if the more rigorous evidence available were substantially less rigorous than it is, I think I would expect things to look pretty much the same, with us just having lower standards—e.g. only being willing to trust certain people’s reports of how interventions were going. So I’m not convinced that some recently attained level of good evidence has much to do with the overall phenomenon of EA.
My other point was that EA isn’t new, but that we don’t recognize earlier attempts because they’re not really doing evidence in a way that we would recognize.
I also think that x-risk was basically not something that many people would worry about until after WWII. Prior to WWII there was not much talk of global warming, and AI, genetic engineering, nuclear war weren’t really on the table yet.
I agree with your points about there being disagreement about EA, but I don’t think that they fully explain why people didn’t come up with it earlier.
I think that there are two things going on here—one is that the idea of thinking critically about how to improve other people’s lives without much consideration of who they are or where they live and then doing the result of that thinking isn’t actually new, and the other is that the particular style in which the EA community pursues that idea (looking for interventions with robust academic evidence of efficacy, and then supporting organizations implementing those interventions that accountably have a high amount of intervention per marginal dollar) is novel, but mostly because the cultural background for it seeming possible as an option at all is new.
To the first point, I’ll just list Ethical Culture, the Methodists, John Stuart Mill’s involvement with the East India Company, communists, Jesuits, and maybe some empires. I could go into more detail, but doing so would require more research than I want to do tonight.
To the second point, I don’t think that anything resembling modern academic social science existed until relatively recently (around the 1890s?), and so prior to that there was nothing resembling peer-reviewed academic evidence about the efficacy of an intervention.
Giving them time to develop methods and be interrupted by two world wars, we would find that “evidence” was not actually developed until fairly recently, and that prior to that people had reasons for thinking that their ideas are likely to work (and maybe even be the most effective plans), but that those reasons would not constitute well-supported evidence in the sense used by the current EA community.
Also the internet makes it much easier for people with relatively rare opinions to find each other, and enables much more transparency much more easily than was possible prior to it.
The kinds of evidence available for some EA interventions, e.g. existential risk ones, doesn’t seem different in kind to the evidence probably available earlier in history. Even in the best cases, EAs often have to lean on a combination of more rigorous evidence and some not very rigorous or evidenced guesses about how indirect effects work out etc. So if the more rigorous evidence available were substantially less rigorous than it is, I think I would expect things to look pretty much the same, with us just having lower standards—e.g. only being willing to trust certain people’s reports of how interventions were going. So I’m not convinced that some recently attained level of good evidence has much to do with the overall phenomenon of EA.
My other point was that EA isn’t new, but that we don’t recognize earlier attempts because they’re not really doing evidence in a way that we would recognize.
I also think that x-risk was basically not something that many people would worry about until after WWII. Prior to WWII there was not much talk of global warming, and AI, genetic engineering, nuclear war weren’t really on the table yet.
Effective altruism as a social movement emerged as the confluence of clusters of non-profit organizations based out of San Francisco, New York, and Oxford