I put two questions in the title because I would like them answered together. I hope that doesn’t break EA rules! I’m still reading through the handbook and norms documents. I also still have to do an intro/profile after I finish reading, if it seems like EA may be a community I should participate in. TIA for bearing with me as a newbie!
The crux of my questions is I’m confused that I’m not seeing more on EA about race and gender equity/justice, human rights, and anti-discrimination efforts. I was wondering how people who have been involved with EA (longer than I) appraise EA’s focus on these topics. If you do not think EA focuses much on these topics, what are some reasons that you think this is so (OK, three questions ; - ). Regardless of how you appraise EA’s involvement with these topics, what do you think are factors that shape the community’s focus?
[Note: moderation set to norm enforcing. I’m new to EA so I don’t quite know what this means, but I am selecting it to be concurrent with EA’s norms.]
Hi!
First of all, welcome :)
Second, answers to your questions:
How much does EA focus on anti-discrimination, equity and human rights?
I’d say ‘not all that much, but somewhat’. There are lots of EAs who are definitely trying to make the EA community itself more diverse, more just, and a better place for people with oppressed/marginalized identities (see e.g. this post on advice for addressing sexual misconduct in the community). But EAs don’t tend to focus on addressing anti-discrimination etc in the world more broadly, as a cause area.
Why doesn’t EA focus on these things? I think for a few reasons, some of which are better than others:
-there is already a lot of good work being done on equity and human rights issues by other groups (e.g. the social justice/progressive movement broadly). On the other hand, some of the causes EAs focus on—global health, AI safety, animal welfare—are comparatively neglected by other groups. So it kinda makes sense for EAs to say ‘we’ll let these other movements keep doing their good work on these issues, and we’ll focus on these other issues that not many people care about’.
-relatedly, EAs care a lot about cost-effectiveness (ie how much demonstrable good can you get for your money), and maybe lots of equity/diversity work is, though important, not cost-effective (ie it’s expensive and the benefit is a bit uncertain)
-EAs focus on what I think of as ‘technical’ solutions to problems—e.g., ‘fixes’ that powerful entities can perform, whereas I see a lot of equity/diversity issues as cultural problems—that is, an NGO or government can’t just swoop in and do some wonk-ish quick fix; whole swathes of people have to change their behaviour. Obviously governments and NGOs do work on diversity/equity issues, but a big part of (eg) feminist or anti-sexist work is just ‘guys learn basic feminist principles and stop being sexist to women’. This is a really important thing to work on, but this is not the ‘style’ of solution that EAs tend to like.
I personally think it’s a shame that more EA work isn’t done on this, because if you can successfully change the culture in positive directions, that can be massively impactful.
-relatedly, historically many EAs have been from STEM or analytic philosophy academic backgrounds, so they are more drawn to ‘science-y’ problems and solutions (like ‘how to cure diseases and distribute those cures’ or ‘how to align artificial intelligence with human values’) rather than ‘humanities’ problems and solutions (like ‘what are the interpersonal dynamics that make people’s lives better or worse and how can we change culture in the positive direction?‘)
-there are lots of people with social privilege in EA: it’s majority white, straight, male, middle-class, etc. (Though getting more diverse on gender and race all the time, I think, and already more diverse on sexuality and stuff like mental health and neurodiversity than many social groups, I’d guess). You might predict that socially-privileged people would care less about equity issues than people who are directly impacted by those issues (obviously not inevitable, many privileged people care about equity issues)
-perhaps relatedly, EA is ‘officially’ apolitical, and equity/discrimination issues are more associated with left-wing or liberal politics. In fact, most EAs are liberal or left, but a decent amount are centrist, apolitical, libertarian or conservative. These EAs might not be interested in equity/discrimination issues, on the basis that they don’t think they’re important, or they dislike standard progressive approaches to them.
Anyway, I wrote a mini-essay there XD but I hope it’s somewhat helpful. Fwiw, I’m a social progressive and I would love to see projects that brought an EA mindset to equity, human rights or anti-discrimination projects.
KJonEA—I agree with most of the comments already offered by Amber Dawn and mhendric. I would just add a couple of points about political partisanship.
EA has generally followed a wise strategy of trying to focus on large-scale, neglected, tractable, global issues, and avoiding getting embroiled in Western partisan political issues—especially those that are controversial parts of the ongoing ‘culture wars’.
Unfortunately, topics of ‘race and gender equity/justice’ and ‘anti-discrimination’ have become central to those culture wars in the US, UK, and other Western countries (with some spillover to other countries). Generally, the political Left promotes a heavy emphasis on ‘diversity, equity, inclusion’ topics as high-priority cause areas, whereas the political Right sees these topics as woke propaganda intended to promote racial and sexual divisions within society, and to enforce a Leftist cultural hegemony over all political discourse.
Also, the epistemics around these issues are really bad. For decades, race/gender equity/justice issues have proven to be issues where it is extremely difficult to have rational, evidence-based, open-minded discussions. Thus, EA’s ‘comparative advantage’ in doing rational, evidence-based, open-minded discussions—which we’re pretty good at, IMHO—would evaporate if EA tried to tackle these issues. We would be just another (relatively) tiny, marginal group trying to steer the public discourse on topics that also are heavily politicized, highly partisan, dominated by professional activist groups, supported by big money, and frequently addressed by journalists, politicians, academics, etc.
Finally, the risks for EA of getting more involved in race/gender equity/justice issues are very high. This is the one domain of modern life where empirically open-minded researchers and groups are most likely to get ‘cancelled’ by online activist mobs. For individual EAs to try to address race/gender equity/justice issues using our usual ‘cause prioritization’ analysis methods, or doing evidence-based literature reviews, or applying consequentialist logic to assessing scope, neglectedness, and tractability, or trying to be politically neutral, would be tantamount to career suicide.
Long story short, millions of activists and thousands of organizations are already focused on race/gender equity/justice issues, those issues are already highly politicized, they already attract a huge amount of talent, money, attention, and debate, and EA has no comparative advantages in addressing them using the mind-sets, empirical strategies, and intellectual insights that we’re good at.
I think Amber’s answer is excellent. I’ll add some more thoughts.
As Amber pointed out, within the EA community, there is a fair amount of focus on anti-discrimination/diversity work focused on the community itself, similar to how many organizations (academic departments / businesses / social groups) increasingly focus on such issues as an aspect required to form a healthy community.
Outside of EA’s own community, as Amber points out, these issues are not focused on as much. One additional reason for why such work is rarely endorsed is that it is typically focused on communities that are not the most marginalized. For example, a lot of work on discrimination focuses on race/gender issues in the US or Europe. These are important issues to address, but they will naturally directly benefit individuals in the US or Europe most. But they rarely interact with e.g. the global extreme poor, i.e. individuals living with an income of less than $1.90 a day, a group that many consider to be the most marginalized group.
These extremely poor individuals seem to be among the worst of individuals globally, and may be in direst need of help. The problem of their continuing neglect by the global community seems more pressing than most problems in developed countries to many EAs. Hence, many EAs will believe that benefiting them takes priority over helping individuals that face unjust treatment in the US or Europe, so long as our resources to rectify injustice and suffering are limited (and we thus have to make choices on who to help).
This does not mean that all EAs share this view, or that no projects on the issues you mention are pursued. Some examples of US-focused initiatives that come to mind are the support of many EAs for Bailfund projects or the Openphil (a large EA funder) work on criminal justice reform. An example of an area where discrimination outside of OECD countries is addressed would be Trans Rescue operations in Uganda.
However, most EAs continue to believe that the most efficient ways of helping individuals is focusing on the global poor and disadvantaged. Given that most EAs believe each individual is equally deserving of our help, they will then focus on interventions that efficiently promote the well-being of those individuals over other interventions.
I personally agree with EA’s current approach to direct work on these topics, which I take to be roughly “Try to look at the areas, identify high-value opportunities for impact, selectively discuss and fund such opportunities”—an approach EA strives to take to most issues. I am very happy about the increased attention diversity is getting within the community, and I believe it has and will continue to increase the health and quality of the EA community.
On another note, I am happy that you are engaging with EA and feel comfortable asking these questions. I hope you continue to raise any questions that come up as you continue to engage with EA. EA is an umbrella for a lot of different organizations and individuals with very different views, so it is absolutely natural to have many questions as one starts to look into it!
Notably OpenPhil have now stopped supporting crime work—for a good overview of some of the issues involved see this article by Nuno.
I thought this post has a good overview.