Thanks, all, for the very thoughtful post and comments!
At some point this year, I hope to make a post about our general reasons for wanting to put some resources into the causes that look best according to different plausible background worldviews and epistemology. Dan Keys and Telofy touched on a lot of these reasons (especially Dan’s #3 and #4).
I think our biggest disagreement with Michael is that he seems to see a couple of particular categories of giving (those relating to farm animal suffering and direct existential risk) as massively and clearly better than others, with high certainty. If we agreed, our approach would be much more similar to what Michael suggests than it is now. We have big uncertainty about our cost-effectiveness estimates, especially as they pertain to issues like flow-through effects. I’ll note that I’ve followed some of Michael’s links but haven’t ended up updating in the direction of more certainty about things he seems to be certain of (such as how we should weigh helping animals compared to helping humans).
We do think we’ve learned a lot about how to compare causes by exploring specific grants, and we think that in the long run, our current approach will yield important option value if we end up buying into worldview/background epistemology that doesn’t match our current best guess. It’s also worth noting that our approach requires commitments to causes, so our choice of focus areas will change less frequently than our views (and with a lag).
I think our other biggest disagreement with Michael is about room for more funding. We are still ramping up knowledge and capacity and have certainly not maxed out what we can do in certain causes, including farm animal welfare, but I expect this to be pretty temporary. I expect that we will hit real bottlenecks to giving more pretty soon. In particular, I am highly skeptical that we could recommend $50 million with even reasonable effectiveness on potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence in the next year (though recommending smaller amounts will hopefully, over time, increase field capacity and make it possible to recommend much more later). We’re not sure yet whether we want to prioritize wild animal suffering, but I think here there is even more of a bottleneck to effective spending in the reasonably near term.
Thanks for the comments, all.
Telofy and kgallas: I’m not planning to write up an exhaustive list of the messages associated with EA that we’re not comfortable with. We don’t have full internal agreement on which messages are good vs. problematic, and writing up a list would be a bit of a project in itself. But I will give a couple of examples, speaking only for myself:
I’m generally uncomfortable with (and disagree with) the “obligation” frame of EA. I’m particularly uncomfortable with messages along the lines of “The arts are a waste when there are people suffering,” “You should feel bad about (or feel the need to defend) every dollar you spend on yourself beyond necessities,” etc. I think messages along these lines make EA sound overly demanding/costly to affiliate with as well as intellectually misguided.
I think there are a variety of messages associated with EA that communicate unwarranted confidence on a variety of dimensions, implying that we know more than we do about what the best causes are and to what extent EAs are “outperforming” the rest of the world in terms of accomplishing good. “Effective altruism could be the last social movement we ever need” and “Global poverty is a rounding error compared to other causes” are both examples of this; both messages have been prominently enough expressed to get in this article , and both messages are problematic in my view.
Telofy: my general answer on a given grant idea is going to be to ask whether it fits into any of our focus areas, and if not, to have a very high bar for it as a “one-off” grant. In this case, supporting ACE fits into the Farm Animal Welfare focus area, where we’ve recently made a new hire; it’s too early to say where this sort of thing will rank in our priorities after Lewis has put some work into considering all the options.