I was inspired by my ties with the EA movement to go do a degree in public health, and while I did not specialize in global health, I did take several classes in global health while getting my master’s. One thing I want to say is that the division between global development and global health is much, much stronger within EA than it is in more mainstream global health. At least as taught at the UW, the intro global health class is just as much about international monetary policy and its effects, as it is about implementing specific scalable health interventions. And, income is one of the three most important social determinants of health globally (along with nutrition and education). This division is stronger in EA imo because it is easy to sell donors in our community on very specific, measurable, high-impact interventions, rather than engage with the politics that end up inherent in the development space. (And that’s not even necessarily a bad thing, if it moves money counterfactually). But, global health as viewed by EAs is not the whole of global health—and (controversial!) I think it’s good that we haven’t upended the entire global health space to the relatively narrow set of GiveWell-approved interventions.
gkcv
Given the pitfalls of mass communication, I am worried that the “forget Veganuary” piece of this will be a bigger takeaway for most people than “donate to help farmed animals”
I think an antagonistic tone actually works well in recruiting folks who are still EA-adjacent, and may still be somewhat-affiliated with the community, or otherwise care a lot about some EA-branded cause areas like AI, but are weary of the discourse and cultural norms and professionalization of the space. For a space that supposedly loves criticism, EA really doesn’t make real space for criticizing a lot of key assumptions and orgs, and it often feels like, if you car about certain causes that aren’t mainstream outside of the movement, you either stick around and keep your mouth shut, or stop seeking to help with those causes. Someone like Holly taking an antagonistic tone means that there are others out there who you could meet and organize with who might think about things in an EA-ish, systematic way...but who aren’t contained by organizational allegiance. And, I’d argue, that integrity is a breath of fresh air and I suspect is very effective in attracting disillusioned EAs
I’m extremely saddened by the dismissal of Pause AI by mainstream EAs. While it was in 2019 and therefore basically another lifetime, I well remember a time when we had many enthusiastic people in EA with time and energy that we were struggling to put to work, leading to all that discussion of “Task Y” and whatnot, but we let them turn into bycatch instead. It seems now that something like Pause AI should always have been an option, and ideally THE option. Thank you for seeing clearly what others haven’t and refuse to.
I would be curious to see this broken down by preexisting mental health status. I don’t expect EA to have much negative mental health impact on people who already have ~normal mental health, but given the widespread normalization of e.g. scrupulosity, AI doomerism on the community level, i suspect that people coming into EA with preexisting mental health concerns might see them get worse, or face slower recovery.
My roommate is the chapter organizer for our city’s Humane League Changemakers, inspired down that path because of involvement with effective altruism and having gone to previous EA Globals. He got a form letter rejection from EA Global saying he should learn more about EA and reapply in the future. Make it make sense.
This is cribbing a bit from Sam[]zdat’s summary of Hoffer’s “The True Believer”, but in brief: I’m skeptical of pushes to make EA more normal because normal people don’t join social movements or intentional communities. Alternative lifestyles like polyamory, atheism and veganism are already largely drawing from people who are alienated from mainstream society enough to start doing things differently. High tolerance for weirdness + a desire to sacrifice in favor of the cause enables abuse in EA, sure. It also enables abuse and grift in your local anarchist co-op, your local BLM circle, probably even your local fusion dance scene.
Joining a demanding community or cause is something that is most appealing to people who are already having trouble fitting into society. That fact creates a lot of problems in any kind of intentional community or cause—I will always be the first to admit this. But not tolerating weirdness probably means paying the price of not really having a movement at all.
Partially the answer to this question is that biodiversity protection involves a wide variety of interventions, some presumably effective, some not, and across all those interventions it is not clear how neglected the cause area actually is.
However, a bigger reason might be the inherent conflict between traditional environmental protection, focusing on biodiversity, and the animal welfare/liberation movement. The latter is a lot more prevalent in effective altruism, through organizations like Animal Charity Evaluators and Wild Animal Initiative. There are some sources I can recommend to help clarify the nature of this conflict, starting with “A Triangular Affair” by J Baird Callicott, and “In Nature’s Interests?” by Gary Varner, but briefly: if wild animals are moral patients with rights, it is not clear that their status as this-or-that-endangered-species matters very much, and vice versa. In EA, we tend to focus on the experience of animals as a neglected source of suffering, and that does trade off against biodiversity concerns.
Finally, the philosophical case for why we should value biodiversity isn’t clear-cut, although I certainly share your intuitions about it! This is an essay from a biologist in the community about what might be valuable about biodiversity and how mainstream environmentalism might be getting it wrong: https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2018/05/27/biodiversity-for-heretics/
Factory farming has gone up along with the same forces of economic expansion that have made things go better for humans over the last 80 years. I don’t see any fundamental reason that AI would change these trends.