There are many parts of this piece worth reading, especially for people who hold Singer in very high regard (and perhaps will stop seeing him that way after reading about his conduct with women*).
However, the part which is in my opinion most relevant to EA, and which sparked some doubts in me personally, is this:
[O]ne cannot always numerically calculate impact. Malcolm Gladwell spells that out in The Tipping Point, a book all activists should read. The Effective Altruism movement urges funders to donate to charities that can prove how many animals they help. One of the top recommendations is a group that urges food companies to stop using eggs from hens in battery cages. That effort will surely help end that one hideous farming practice and ease some of the suffering of billions of animals. But those approaching the companies would have no success if other activists weren’t changing public opinion, pushing the envelope, and putting societal pressure on those companies to at least make some improvements. Thanks to Effective Altruism, however, the guys negotiating the deals to get millions of animals bigger cages are grabbing the bulk of funding, while those changing the way society views animals, who can’t count the number of animals they have helped, are, by Effective Altruism standards, not worth funding.
Effective Altruism starves out the activists creating the sparks, and Peter Singer wonders why our movement isn’t lighting up the world.
*Edit: I don’t know if the many down/disagreevotes are related to the “conduct with women” part or the “effective altruism” part, but I’ll expand on the former: what I find especially damning, regardless of the exact details of his particular relationship with the author, is the accusation that he only gave important professional opportunities to women activists who had slept with him.
It’s a fair argument, but not well supported as written. Corporate campaigns and changing public opinion are complements. The latter would have zero impact without public pressure; the former would have impact only insofar as members of the public took action on their own. That doesn’t tell us much about the best split between funding these two complements, after non-EA funding is taken into account.
My sense is that many of the returns for improving general public opinion in this area accrue over a long period of time (i.e., the consumer’s lifetime). If one thought, for instance, that cultured meat or other alternatives will be economically and otherwise competitive, and environmentally superior, within 20 years—then a significant fraction of the returns on improving public opinion may not matter very much because economic and/or environmental issues will carry the day anyway.
It’s true that it doesn’t reveal the right split—but on the other hand, it shines a light on us in EA funneling money towards the easily measurable parts of complex interdependent systems, and neglecting to account for the less measurable parts.
I’m sadly skeptical about cultured meat, mostly because of reports I’ve read here on the forum but don’t have the time to find at the moment.
That’s fair, and I think at a very minimum the messaging toward the activist community could often be a little more charitable. “Although it is challenging to evaluate the impact of your work using our toolkit, we do not think that the level of generalized public support for animal welfare (of the sort we think your work is likely to produce) is currently the limiting factor to achieving more impact. We appreciate that much of the work we currently fund stands on the shoulders of activists who have worked over the past several decades, and we do not intend our allocation of very limited marginal funding to suggest otherwise.”
While I ostensibly agree regarding the activist community, I think this problem is probably not unique to activism vs. interventions that ‘tip the scales’ after it had been done. Many systems have interdependent parts, some of which are easier to measure than others.
There are many parts of this piece worth reading, especially for people who hold Singer in very high regard (and perhaps will stop seeing him that way after reading about his conduct with women*).
However, the part which is in my opinion most relevant to EA, and which sparked some doubts in me personally, is this:
*Edit: I don’t know if the many down/disagreevotes are related to the “conduct with women” part or the “effective altruism” part, but I’ll expand on the former: what I find especially damning, regardless of the exact details of his particular relationship with the author, is the accusation that he only gave important professional opportunities to women activists who had slept with him.
It’s a fair argument, but not well supported as written. Corporate campaigns and changing public opinion are complements. The latter would have zero impact without public pressure; the former would have impact only insofar as members of the public took action on their own. That doesn’t tell us much about the best split between funding these two complements, after non-EA funding is taken into account.
My sense is that many of the returns for improving general public opinion in this area accrue over a long period of time (i.e., the consumer’s lifetime). If one thought, for instance, that cultured meat or other alternatives will be economically and otherwise competitive, and environmentally superior, within 20 years—then a significant fraction of the returns on improving public opinion may not matter very much because economic and/or environmental issues will carry the day anyway.
It’s true that it doesn’t reveal the right split—but on the other hand, it shines a light on us in EA funneling money towards the easily measurable parts of complex interdependent systems, and neglecting to account for the less measurable parts.
I’m sadly skeptical about cultured meat, mostly because of reports I’ve read here on the forum but don’t have the time to find at the moment.
That’s fair, and I think at a very minimum the messaging toward the activist community could often be a little more charitable. “Although it is challenging to evaluate the impact of your work using our toolkit, we do not think that the level of generalized public support for animal welfare (of the sort we think your work is likely to produce) is currently the limiting factor to achieving more impact. We appreciate that much of the work we currently fund stands on the shoulders of activists who have worked over the past several decades, and we do not intend our allocation of very limited marginal funding to suggest otherwise.”
While I ostensibly agree regarding the activist community, I think this problem is probably not unique to activism vs. interventions that ‘tip the scales’ after it had been done. Many systems have interdependent parts, some of which are easier to measure than others.