Excellent post! And completely agree that as you adopt a longterm focus, growth and state capacity become even more important.
Peter Elam
Karma: 236
Excellent write-up and I completely agree with the massive impact voting reform would have if it could gain momentum. As a real-life example of its impact, I like this Washington Post article How ranked-choice voting saved the Virginia GOP from itself (I apologize if you linked to this somewhere in your post, I didn’t see it).
Another organization working on this is Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center, although I have no idea what their budget is.
I think this is a great post and I’m really glad that you wrote this up. You were very smart in the way that you approached this experiment and it sounds like you learned some valuable lessons. In general community spaces are very tricky to establish, and successful ones have to get a lot of details right.
Strongly agree with all of the fundamental points of this post.
I currently work for a shadow government NGO of sorts in California that was spun up to address the massive governance failures in the state in the late 2000s.
Improving governance in California, I see you like working on the easy problems huh? ;-)
I completely agree governance is the big fundamental problem that underlies most of the others, and that so much impact work is treating the symptoms while ignoring the disease. It strikes me that what’s most needed is leaders who can coordinate efforts and point the way forward in tangible ways (your list is a start). Maybe that’s you?
There are probably hundreds of high schools located within close proximity to large US universities, including universities with stronger math programs than the University of Florida.
The reason parents push to get on Mr. Frazer’s radar is because he built a successful ecosystem. One of the core reasons you build an ecosystem is to attract talent. The success of what he built is what attracts additional talent. When he started nobody was trying to get on his radar, that only happened once the program gained momentum.
And of course tails, if they are remarkable, are reflected in averages. But all of that aside. Before he arrived and built the the program the math team was unremarkable. The thing that’s meaningfully different is what he built, not the talent pool he was drawing from (especially at the beginning). I’m sure the talent pool he’s drawing from now is much stronger.
Analysis is of course incredibly important no matter what you are trying to do. Ecosystem building requires an incredible amount of analysis to answer these and a myriad of other questions. But analysis coupled with building/data gathering/experimentation is much better than analysis alone.
From my post:
It provides a place for analysis and practice to intersect—Many current EAs may be stronger in gathering and analyzing data to help guide and influence those on the front lines. At the same time, all analysis is improved by interaction with the real world. This represents a place where those that analyze and those that build can interact to their mutual benefit.
Analysis is of course incredibly important no matter what you are trying to do. Analysis coupled with building/data gathering/experimentation is much better than analysis alone.
“It’s much easier, and more reliable, to assess a project once it’s already been tried.”
you also don’t want us to be too wedded to our conclusions
Isn’t not being wedded to your conclusions a core idea of the EA movement?
But I just want to emphasize that, in my view, analysis (and specifically cause neutrality) is what makes EA unique. If you take out the analysis, then it’s not clear what value EA has to offer the rest of the charity / social impact world.
So of course I am not suggesting EA take out the analysis. From my post:
It provides a place for analysis and practice to intersect—Many current EAs may be stronger in gathering and analyzing data to help guide and influence those on the front lines. At the same time, all analysis is improved by interaction with the real world. This represents a place where those that analyze and those that build can interact to their mutual benefit.
My second thought is what is EAs core priority? Is it uniqueness or impact? If becoming less unique increases your impact would you choose to become less unique? If the core value is maximizing impact, all secondary values should be subordinate to that one.
If you find out, let me know!
I was responding to the series of questions that implied building these would mean encountering difficult or impossible to answer questions.
I just mean leadership in the most generic way; as in those that lead teams, organizations, hold government positions, etc.
Are you able to expand a bit more on what you mean in “ I also think the subculture is stronger (and stranger) than many highly-committed EAs understand.”
That would be a really long post. There’s the stated values of EA (which as I said are relatively sensible and uncontroversial), and the reality of actually interacting with EA. I read some comment on the forum (I can’t find it) that was talking about how EA in its current form is actually an amalgamation of several like-minded movements/organizations (Givewell, rationalism community, etc.) and that really helped me understand the culture a lot better. I’d also say this post hits a lot of the highlights.
I don’t think they’re un-analyzable either. I think EA should probably provide funding to help scale the most effective ones (if they want/need it), and fund new ones that they deem to be especially promising.
So I’d be a little careful about those statements. Countries with a history of corruption are improving all the time, and in fact the divergence of the Dominican Republic and Haiti (two countries that literally share an island) are a stark example of that. Governance does tend to improve incrementally, but in many many places it has improved substantially over time. Here in Mexico governance is significantly less corrupt than it was when the PRI party had unchallenged dominance.
I am not an expert on how much of that is because of outside interventions versus other things, but due to the outsized returns to improved governance I think it isn’t something to dismiss as hopeless. Perhaps improved governance is an intractable problem for a movement like EA. I would just be careful about reaching that conclusion too quickly. And indeed portions of EA seem to engage directly with improving governance (such as better voting systems).
The Haiti example was a thought experiment to contrast that approach with current EA approaches.
I think the world would unquestionably benefit from a more efficient/effective philanthropy sector. A central tenet of EA seems to be that the philanthropic sector is too inefficient. I think that sentiment is very uncontroversial, even among those operating within the sector. Engaging with those in the sector that share your core values, and helping them become more efficient, is a great way to maximize impact (in my view). I also think the statement ‘more than what EAs would otherwise be doing’ reflects a scarcity mindset that made a lot more sense in days past. EA has traditionally been a small movement, it doesn’t have to remain that way.
Two points. First, I don’t think jettisoning the EA culture is desirable or even possible. As the movement grows some cultural change is inevitable, and posts about these cultural growing pains are some of the most popular on the forum. What I think is desirable is taking the best of what EA’s culture and people have to offer to help influence and improve all these other altruistic efforts. But doing that means a willingness to partner with and engage a wider group of people and organizations. The entire EA movement does not need to pivot in this way, but it is a direction that I think at least a modest of part of EA should explicitly start experimenting with in the name of maximizing impact. You conduct experiments, collect data, and go from there.
Second. I think that ecosystem building is long and difficult work filled with a lot of very hard decisions. The reason people engage with it (including everyone involved in building the overall EA ecosystem) is because of the large payoffs if you are successful.
There’s a lot here, but I would just say building ecosystems of leaders and builders is not an exotic idea, but actually something that is extremely common. Even just restricting it to the altruistic space, the The Nonprofit Centers Network has many spaces that are analogous to the example I gave.
Each space in the international Impact Hub network is self sustaining, and actually does not receive any seed funding (they’re mostly funded by friends/family or bank loans). And it is a completely reasonable to expect any space to be self-sustaining after it is seeded.
The building of EA hubs in cities across the world might turn out to be a bad idea, but as I pointed out it’s not my idea (it was the runner up in an EA ideas contest), and versions of it are currently being pursued by various different groups in the movement right now.
I think that the overall philanthropic sector could benefit greatly from more collaboration with EA, and that EA could take a leadership role to help to systematically improve it. However, that would require a shift in thinking.
Again, from my (an admitted outsider) perspective there seems to be a tension between “this is who we’re for and this is how we do things” and the actual goal of maximizing impact. I’m all about trying to maximize impact, I’m not sure that I would have been a part of the various organizations that EA seems to be an amalgamation of.
I think a bigger tent version of EA is definitely a community I could join, but as it stands right now the biggest benefit for me is connecting with individuals within the movement that are like-minded. This post and some other conversations have really helped me do that.
Thank you for the reply Martin!! And I completely agree that I made some large claims without sufficient evidence. That’s primarily because I got feedback that the post was very long as-is, and I made a decision not to flesh out the leadership part (which could be a very long post of its own).
I just want to be clear that I actually don’t want EA to make any significant pivot. I do think that leadership/governance is not discussed by the community to the level of its importance, but I don’t know if corruption/poor governance is a tractable problem for EA (maybe it is, I genuinely don’t know).
My main recommendation, and what I’m fundamentally arguing for, is that EA become a bigger tent organization that builds ecosystems of altruistic leaders and builders, and that engages with the larger nonprofit community in order to systematically improve it.
There are a lot of wonderful-sounding ideas like ecosystem-building out there, that hit all the right intuitions and are hard to explicitly argue against.
Totally agree. Which is why I recommend a series of (relatively) small scale ecosystem building experiments to learn from. As I say, this could be done at low cost, but it does represent a shift from the current strategies that I’ve seen. I think a lot of these experiments would fail, but the ones that didn’t could be quite impactful and could yield some very important insights. But I’m not suggesting a fundamental EA pivot in funding priorities or anything like that.
In terms of the governance/corruption stuff.
I would just say that the link between good governance and desirable outcomes is a very strong one, and that counterexamples are more an exception to the rule (typically places that are extraordinarily gifted with natural resources like Kuwait). There is of course a lot of evidence to back that up, but here is once piece (Human Development Index vs. Corruption Perception Index).
I’ve heard many people say that the Chinese economic miracle is the largest poverty reduction program in history. That was set in motion (I think pretty much uncontroversially) by a change in leadership from Mao to Deng. Singapore’s economic transformation under Lee Kuan Yew was perhaps even more miraculous given the city’s lack of resources and foreign support in the beginning.
There is of course a lot more to be said here, but I would just say the Mexico/governance/corruption points were secondary to my main points. And I completely agree they were not adequately supported. I could make a much stronger support of those points, but that would be an entire post.
Yeah. Foreign aid is often problematic in corrupt countries, and it can be a major major problem. A quote from the Haiti / DR article that I linked to in the footnotes:
After the 2010 earthquake, Haiti elected Michel Martelly, a former pop star, to the presidency. When his successor, the late Jovenel Moïse, took office, an investigation revealed that Martelly’s administration had embezzled about $2 billion of aid.
Last weekend I was speaking to a leader of a nonprofit last gives large sums of aid to Haiti, and she was telling me just how difficult it is to translate the aid into tangible impact because of the corruption.
With the Effective Altruists that I’ve spoken to the feedback has been very very supportive, but I’m not sure if I’ve spoken to enough to get a truly representative sample. The most negative ‘feedback’ I’ve gotten has been on receiving generic rejection notices on my grant proposals, which is something I completely understand, but that also makes someone like me unsure if there’s a place for me and my ideas in the movement. The main point of this post for me was to try to figure that out and to see if I could find some like-minded individuals.
And I totally agree that the way to try this is multiple small-scale experiments. There are a lot of factors that go into success and failure, and every context is unique. But when it’s done right, it really can have a major impact.
Is the goal of EA to maximize impact, or some other collection of things? If EA losing some of its distinct culture helps it execute on its stated core mission, isn’t that ok?