I blog about political/economic theory and moral philosophy.
Sam Battis
Karma: 179
I’m pretty new to the movement and generally have never done research at a high formal level, so I suppose expertise. Is there a link somewhere to a sort of guide for doing research at the level of detail expected?
I also think that EA sometimes dismisses categories of problems out of an assumption that most solutions currently proposed to those problems are either not neglected or have a low expected value, despite the likelihood that high-value opportunities are lurking amidst the chaff.
After all, EA’s original focus was sorting through the labyrinth of ineffective direct global health and poverty reduction interventions. In theory, we should now be sorting through other broad fields like public policy, climate change, and so on, to find interventions comparable to the best direct aid/global development opportunities.
In the climate change realm, environmental law groups like Earthjustice appear on paper to be competitive with top GiveWell nonprofits. Much more thorough research would be needed, but napkin calculations seem promising.
I think that for consequentialists, capability-maximization would fall into the same sphere as identifying and agitating for better laws, social rules, etc. Despite not being deontologists, sophisticated consequentialists recognize the importance of deontological-type structures, and thinking in terms of capabilities (which seem similar to rights, maybe negative rights in some cases like walking at night) might be useful in the same way that human rights are useful—as a tool to clarify one’s general goals and values and interpersonally coordinate action.
I think a movement is shaped to a rather large degree by its optics/culture, because that is what will determine who joins and to a lesser extent, who stays when things go wrong.
It seems plausible to me that a culture of somewhat spartan frugality, which seems (from my relatively uninformed perspective) like it was a larger part of the movement in the past, would have a larger positive impact on EA conferences than the stimulating-ness of the site. There’s something poetic about working harder in less onerous conditions than others would, forgoing luxury for extra donations, that I would imagine is at least as animating to the types of people in EA as scenery.
Beyond that, preserving core cultural aspects of a movement, even if the cost is substantial, is crucial to the story that the movement aims to tell.
Most people who are EAs today were inspired by the story of scrappy people gathering in whatever way is cheapest and most accessible, cheeks flushed with intellectual passion, figuring out how to stretch their dollars for the greater good. I think this aesthetic differs substantially from that of AI researchers in a castle, in terms of both losing the “slumming it out for the world” vibe and focusing on the reduction of an existential risk in a way that only a few people can understand rather than global development in a way that everyone can understand.
I’m sure the AI researchers are extremely competent and flushed with intellectual passion for the greatest good too, regardless of where they’re working. Maybe even more so in the castles. I am solely critiquing the optics and their potential cultural effect.
I have little formal evidence for this except the interest in and occasional resistance to the shift towards longtermism that seems widespread on the forum and a few external articles on EA. But I strongly suspect that “people with a career relating to longtermism” is an attractive archetypal representation of the epitome EA to far fewer people than “person who argues about the best place to donate, and donates as much as they can”, because the latter is much more relatable and attainable.
Perhaps an EA mostly focused on attracting select candidates for high impact careers will be more impactful than an EA attempting to make a wide, diffuse cultural impact by including many grassroots supporters. However, it seems that this runs the risk of modifying the target audience of EA from “everyone, because nearly everyone can afford at least 1% with a giving pledge” to .1% of the population of developed countries.
To me, it is at least plausible that the sheer cost of losing the grassroots-y story, paid in fewer, perhaps less-ideologically-committed new recruits, and a generally less positive public view of things related to effective altruism and rationality, could swing the net effect in the other direction. I think the mainstream being influenced over time to be more concerned with sentient beings, more concerned with rationality and calculating expected values on all sorts of purchases/donations, etc is a major potential positive impact that a more outward-facing EA could make.
If EA loses hold of the narrative and becomes, in the eye of the public, “sketchy, naive Masonic elites who only care about their own pet projects, future beings and animals”, I believe the cost to both EA and broader society will be high. Anecdotally, I have seen external articles critiquing EA from these angles, but never from the angle “EA worries too much about its own image”.
The environmental law groups like Earthjustice have a quite strong return on investment from my limited research. Not sure if it would be considered controversial, but it does check the climate change box.
True, their role in defending the endangered species act, conserved land, and water/air quality regulations is also extremely valuable, just harder to quantify in terms of lives saved. If those types of victories account for, say, 3⁄4 of Earthjustice’s impact, then the numbers start to suggest that each of the lawyers make a much bigger impact (3x+ perhaps) than $200,000 in donations per year, as I was able to find another large strictly-carbon win for 2022 (electrifying mail trucks).
Adding in the value of deterrence and the diffuse cultural impact of the group, it could conceivably be an order of magnitude better.
Bonus evaluation of another 2022 win: 66,160 electric mail trucks replacing 8mpg gasoline trucks over the next few years, directly as a result of suing over a plan that would have purchased 106,000 entirely gasoline trucks over that time. They also got them to guarantee all electric from 2026 onwards.
If a mail truck does a 30-mile route, and idling and driving back account for 3⁄4 of total fuel usage, then 120miles/8mph = 15 gallons of gas would have been burned. Every gallon is 8.887kg of carbon. So over a year, assuming the vehicle is driven 320 days, that’s 42,658kg or 42.7 metric tons. Let’s say the electricity still pollutes 2⁄3 of the amount as gasoline, because a lot of it is fossil fuels. That’s 14.2 metric tons saved, per vehicle, per year. Let’s say the vehicles are in use for 15 years each. 66,160 vehicles * 15 years * 14.2 tons/vehicle/year = 14,092,080 metric tons saved. And that’s not even to mention the guarantee of only electric after 2026, or the fact that the electricity will probably start to come from cleaner sources.
So actually, this case is even bigger than the other I examined. It’s exceeded the impact by 2041, nine years earlier, plus it has even more impact, potentially twice the impact, after the guarantee is added in. So there were at least two major wins for Earthjustice in 2022, and if all the rest of its victories and deterrence added up to four major wins, then working as an Earthjustice lawyer was at least as good as donating $200,000 to GiveWell.
And this isn’t even to consider the fact that some of the bigshot corporate law cases might have moral negatives, e.g. a citizen or government body righteously sues a company, and you’re helping the company get away with it.
Is the nonprofit lawyer really making a lower impact per hour worked compared to the earning-to-give corporate lawyer? This could be a good case study of system change efforts vs direct donation.
Let’s say the lawyer is donating $200,000/year less than they would have if they stayed at a for-profit firm (donating $200,000 requires an extremely high percentile conviction in the efficacy of effective donation and something like top 1-5% earnings for a lawyer, but I’ll use this to be conservative), but now is working on enforcing environmental legislation.
$4500 to save a life with AMF in Guinea according to Givewell: $200,000/$4500 = 45 lives saved per year from malaria. So in a twenty-year career at the nonprofit, say, the lawyer would have to accomplish good equivalent to saving 900 lives.
The easiest way to convert impact to lives is probably estimating the lives lost for a given amount of carbon emitted. Thankfully, this has been done. They found that 4434 metric tons of carbon saved is a life saved. So the lawyer needs to save 3,990,600 tons of carbon to hit equivalence.
Looking through the “recent wins” page of Earthjustice, the largest environmental justice employer, is a case that is estimated to have saved 970,000,000-1,800,000,000 tons of carbon by 2050. Earthjustice can’t take full credit for this—they were just part of a team suing, along with many city and state governments. Let’s say their expertise was responsible for 1% of the win. Taking the midpoint of the carbon estimate, 1,385,000,000 was saved, of which Earthjustice was responsible for 13,850,000.
This means that if every lawyer at Earthjustice (there are 200+, so we’ll estimate 299 to be super safe and account for other workers who are supporting them) had a win that big just once over their twenty-year career, they would each be outperforming $200,000/yr donated by a factor of 4.
If this singular recent win was the whole impact of Earthjustice for 2022, how would that stack up, divided among 299 lawyers/personnel?
Well, that’s 46,321 tons of carbon, per lawyer, per year. Over 20 years that’s 926,421 tons. So, rather poor. That’s about a fourth of the impact of the $200,000/year. Equivalently, Earthjustice needs to put out 4 wins of that magnitude a year to justify its existence through proactive action alone (though a decent percentage of their actual impact is in deterrence, I’d imagine). Here’s the recent victories page if you want to judge for yourself how large the impact of various wins are. (EDIT: I found at least one other 2022 win with comparable carbon impact, see comments below).
Overall, I’d say it’s quite plausible—even probable, after further consideration (see the comments below)--that the environmental lawyer would have equivalent or greater impact. To be fair, OP was written when the cost estimate of saving a life with GiveWell was much lower.
Thank you for the reply, it was very thought provoking. It seems to me you have successfully found a niche that provides higher altruistic ROI with regard to career than a large portion of political-adjacent careers. As far as I can tell, many STEM-inclined people can make their greatest impact by focusing on innovation and to a lesser extent earning-to-give.
I wrote a paper on kidney sales for an undergrad philosophy course, and with my small sliver of knowledge on the debate, I agree that it is likely not the best time sink for changing the world efficiently. I think the conclusion I came to is that if there was a strong social safety net (to reduce the incentive for impoverished people who may not be healthy enough to donate to attempt to do so anyways, as occurs when people try to donate blood more often than permitted in order to obtain the cash rewards), the kidneys were added to the waiting list rather than sold to the highest bidder, and participants were well informed of the risks, it would be a net positive to legalize a regulated market. But as you said, this is a debate where it is extremely difficult to be confident that one’s position would actually produce a net positive outcome in practice.
I feel very differently with regard to lack of public services—I think there is enough evidence to suggest that there is probably a pretty significant economic boost to be expected from investment in high-speed railways and single-payer healthcare, to say nothing of the moral impact of the latter. Plus, in contrast to allowing kidney sales, there seems to be far less emotional intuition warning me against such reforms. My conviction is strongly reinforced by the fact that most developed countries in the world provide these services, which are considered indispensable by most of the inhabitants of those countries. On the other hand, kidney sales have not been legalized anywhere in the world, as far as I’m aware.
As you point out, it may take a prohibitive amount of time for one of us to convince the other of our economic stances, but I will try to summarize my opposition to your points succinctly for the sake of it.
Efforts of ancestors in vain—I believe that the majority of policies that provide opportunities to working people in developed countries have had lasting and significant net positive impacts, and that when almost any of these policies are repealed (as many have been in the US and the UK over the last few decades), there is a marked negative impact on both natl GDP growth and natl wellbeing. In essence, it is not an all-or-nothing debate, but rather a struggle worth fighting every generation anew. I believe the American middle class as we knew it was largely created by policies from the 1930s-1970s, for example, and that its decline has been caused more by a shift rightward economically than by shipping jobs overseas, technological disruption, or any of the other explanations provided by some economists. Such arguments, in my view, fail to explain the totality of the change, or the fact that it has been so much more pronounced in countries that gutted their public sector.
Not good to act in opposition to billionaire interests—I think this defers unnecessarily to individuals who are citizens of developed nations, after all, and whose power similarly rests in the vehicles of corporations which also can be effectively regulated by national or international law. During the Gilded Age we had powerful, unprecedently rich men, and corporations wielded intolerable power over the lives of many of their workers. Then in the early 1900s Progressives came in and guaranteed shorter workdays, did some trust-busting, and passed a bunch of worker protections generally. FDR and LBJ continued that legacy. Now, we’ve gotten rid of the protections and the taxes on the hyper-wealthy that enabled them, and we’re in the same place again. The US experienced the most economic and social vitality as a nation in the interim between these two periods. Obviously, there is no way to test models of different historical economic and political decisions to see what changed what. But I feel at least 90% confident that it is better for the US to be farther left economically than it is currently, perhaps by going in some unorthodox direction, like embracing Georgism. I also think the butterfly impacts of such reforms often are far more relevant than they initially appear.
If you think it would be optimal for us to debate further, DM me, although I suspect the depth of our knowledge of economics is similar, so neither of us will be able to convert the other by pulling overwhelming data or expertise out of a hat.
I agree, and I think shoring up democracy and creating strong public guarantees of human wellbeing/opportunity like the social safety net and public goods including parks and education are great ways to do that.
AIs will still have to work with governments, so we want to be in a place of strong social cohesion and international cooperation when singularity is reached.
I think that countries for whom reducing inequality was almost a religious conviction, such as the USSR, had terrible governments which should never be replicated. However, I think that countries that invest in their public sector and social safety net more so than the US or the UK have very good track records today. There’s always the classic Scandinavia example and I think the UK’s rocky economic performance over the past twenty years has a lot to do with its push to privatize and reduce provision of public services. Germany does fairly well although they do tend to try to undercut the rest of the EU with their (more permissive) labor regulation. Impossible to tell for sure, but I think Japan would have had an even rougher go of it if it engaged in as little public investment as the Anglophone countries. The biggest issue for many of these countries is birth rate, although it’s worth noting that Scandinavia outperforms the rest of the EU on this except France and way outperforms East Asia, and their generous maternity/paternity leave is likely part of that.
Providing these public goods does indeed require persuading billionaires to give you money, and there is always the issue of capital flight. Thankfully, countries like the US and the UK are often the recipients of that capital flight because they have a large population, speak English, and have lots of fun things for rich people to do, plus lower taxes. So I’m sure that some amount of capital flight or attempts at tax evasion would result from these countries raising obligations on their richest citizens, but I think if anything it is likely to be less dramatic than what most of Europe has suffered for their welfare states, and I think the decision was still a net positive for those countries. In my reckoning, combining Northern European institutions with America’s birth rate and dynamic multiculturalism would probably result in even greater economic growth than America currently enjoys.
It’s all definitely up for debate though. Thanks for the response!
Thank you for your response! I wasn’t aware of those EA political action funds or the fact that some EA groups do local work.
1. I agree wholeheartedly that rich country politics are a saturated field and EA should avoid conventional engagement with them. On its grandest scale, I believe EA should always be about more nonpartisan direct giving and existential risk prevention, because these things are very quantifiably good, and that’s extremely important.
My argument is more that building local EA groups through engagement with local issues could expand the movement and induce greater investment from those already on board, by giving your average EA with a job not directly related to the highest-impact fields another way to engage with the gospel of effective doing that unites EAs. This average EA might currently spend 20 money-units on a cocktail of GiveWell and existential risk donations and 20 time-units on deciding what to donate to and engaging with the local group. My hypothesis is that if local EA groups pursued a dual strategy of local and international work, discussing the highest-impact opportunities in each separately with an understanding that international work provides more bang-for-buck but there’s still effective ways to spend time on local issues, that average EA would still spend 20 money-units on Givewell and existential risk, but they might add 1 money-unit on seed money for a local political campaign and double their time-unit investment because there is now a local project that the group decided to work on. Plus EA’s fame grows as a movement that is most dedicated to the highest international good, but is nonetheless willing to put in some local effort. I think it Feels Good to do something local and outsiders will Feel Good about EA if it accomplishes some useful local thing.
2. I want to steer super clear of DSA-like stuff. I am joining EA and not the DSA for a reason—the quality of meta-debate, introspection, and ideological diversity of EA make it far more likely to have a long-term positive impact on the world, in my opinion. I think EA’s reverence for quantification and transparency is also pretty unmatched. Plus I think EAs are correct, from a moral-calculus perspective, to spend their energies building a movement with more expansive goals than political groups and more focus on things like direct aid. I think local projects would have to target non-incendiary policies, if they targeted policies at all. YIMBYism or improving voting accessibility or advocating for public parks are the kind of policies that seem to be in the sweet spot of impactful, maybe a bit neglected, and not likely to alienate anyone (maybe some YIMBY policies are too dangerous in this regard though). On the individual or really small group level EAs might do little things like getting permission from the city to build a small bridge over a neighborhood creek or making one of those little book libraries from scratch. I think what I’m envisioning is just a bimodal culture of care where you put like 95% of your philanthropic money into international efforts but much of your philanthropic time goes towards bonding with EAs on local projects. Maybe what I’m describing isn’t actually that far off from some local EA groups. As far as I can tell, it’s pretty different from the one where I live, though.
I think even with regard to local policy-related issues, EA would do it better than a group like DSA, by identifying the policies that are most universally-desirable, and having the ability to ignore the political sphere if no impactful opportunities arise.
3. I have to agree that poverty in the UK is a different and altogether less pressing issue than poverty in Zimbabwe. I think that was probably the weakest segment of my argument. I do, however, think that the general compression of the middle classes of these countries have enough negative psychological and social impacts as to be concerned for the wellbeing of both the inhabitants of these countries and those countries’ institutions. If things aren’t going well in rich countries, how can we fix the world by making poor countries into rich countries? (Obviously it’s more efficient to focus on poor countries, but I think we should at least make symbolic or local efforts in rich countries).
4. I’m not sure how to improve the institutions of developing countries either, to be honest, but given how impactful it seems likely to be, I think EA should look into how it might be done. I suspect that at least some high-impact opportunities would be revealed by the search. To your other point, I think making the US less unequal and more democratic would actually have extremely dramatic impacts on future world history. From pure GDP and military numbers, it seems crucial that it perfects its institutions and is a global steward for good governance, especially in a world with reasonably strong autocracies that would like to see liberalism rot from the inside out. Good governance is a subject for debate, but assuming one’s assessment is accurate, if money could effectively be spent on improving US governance, it would probably be one of the most impactful causes in the world to focus on. Alas, it is also the most crowded market on earth and it is probably only worthwhile to spend money on extremely specific overlooked efforts to improve governance. For example, if there was a really promising, really transparent movement run by EA-aligned people to give everyone Election Day off, I might give it a bit of seed money.
5. That sounds great. Will have to investigate further.
6. I agree that “reducing inequality” is not an end that inherently justifies itself, and certainly wouldn’t make a good prospective tenet of EA. On the other hand, although this obviously is still up for debate, I think there’s pretty good evidence for the long-term economic and social benefits of a larger public sector and social safety net than the US and the UK currently have. Those are the kinds of policies I could see EA advocating for, at least from my relatively uninformed perspective about what EAs consider too political for the scope of the movement. I agree that ideological diversity is inherently good for a movement. I think if there was some apparatus for community endorsement of a policy, requiring 80% consensus would be a pretty good protection against alienation, but I could be wrong about this.
7. Really cool stuff, this is the kind of thing I was envisioning for selective engagement with the political system. I think it’s good to have this stuff on the side as long as it doesn’t come to dominate too much, especially not the “international” side of the local/international focuses. I’m currently using a 75/75/75 rule for my own donation where 75% goes to immediately-impactful GiveWell aid, 75% of the remaining 25% goes to existential risk, 75% of the remaining 6.25% goes to improving governance, and the remaining 1.56% goes to pet/local projects. I think I will be donating to these funds as part of my governance donation, particularly the YIMBY one as it seems underfunded to me.
Again, thanks for the reply!
Why are you pessimistic? I assume it has something to do with perceived power dynamics or incentive misalignment?
It seems like a crowd sourcing mechanism for potential solutions, plus a small team to manage the data and make estimates on expected info cost, actual cost, and impact, would be fairly simple to implement.
Maybe one could even lean harder into crowdsourcing the info/actual costs and impact by operating a sort of prediction market on it, so if a solution is indeed researched at some point and your prediction of the info and actual estimated costs was correct/close, you get points and higher weighting in future crowdsourced estimates?