weeatquince

The case of the miss­ing cause pri­ori­ti­sa­tion research

• weeatquince 18 Jan 2023 10:23 UTC

  149 points

  82 ∶ 34

  in reply to: Buck’s comment on: Do­ing EA Better

  I strongly downvoted this response.

  The response says that EA will not change “people in EA roles [will] … choose not to”, that making constructive critiques is a waste of time “[not a] productive ways to channel your energy” and that the critique should have been better “I wish that posts like this were clearer” “you should try harder” “[maybe try] politely suggesting”.

  This response seems to be putting all the burden of making progress in EA onto those trying to constructively critique the movement, those who are putting their limited spare time into trying to be helpful, and removing the burden away from those who are actively paid to work on improving this movement. I don’t think you understand how hard it is to write something like this, how much effort must have gone into making each of these critiques readable and understandable to the EA community. It is not their job to try harder, or to be more polite. It is our job, your job, my job, as people in EA orgs, to listen and to learn and to consider and if we can to do better.

  Rather than saying the original post should be better maybe the response should be that those reading the original post should be better at considering the issues raised.

  I cannot think of a more dismissive or disheartening response. I think this response will actively dissuade future critiques of EA (I feel less inclined to try my had at critical writing seeing this as the top response) and as such make the community more insular and less epistemically robust. Also I think this response will make the authors of this post feel like their efforts are wasted an unheard.

A prac­ti­cal guide to long-term plan­ning – and sug­ges­tions for longtermism

• weeatquince 6 Apr 2022 18:13 UTC

  136 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Stefan_Schubert’s comment on: The Vul­tures Are Circling

  I might be in the minority view here but I liked the style this post was written in, emotive language and all. It was flowery language but that made it fun to read it and I did not find it to be alarmist (e.g. it clearly says “this problem has yet to become an actual problem”).

  And more importantly I think the EA Forum is already a daunting place and it is hard enough for newcomers to post here without having to face everyone upvoting criticisms of their tone /​ writing style /​ post title. It Is not the perfect post (I think there is a very valid critique in what Stefan says that the post could have benefited from linking to some examples /​ evidence) but not everything here needs to be in the perfect EA-speak. Especially stuff from newcomers.

  So welcome CitizenTen. Nice to have you here and to hear your views. I want to say I enjoyed reading the post (don’t fully agree tho) and thank you for it. :-)

• weeatquince 9 Mar 2022 23:46 UTC

  127 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Con­cerns with the Wel­lbe­ing of Fu­ture Gen­er­a­tions Bill

  TL;DR

  Lots of good critical points in this post. However I would want readers to note that:

  • None of the criticisms in the post really pertain to the core elements of the bill. The theory of change for the bill is: government doesn’t make long term plans > tell government to make long term plans (i.e. set a long term vision and track progress towards it) > then government will make long term plans. This approach has had research and thought put into it.

  • This draft of the bill makes much more sense when you see it as a campaigning tool, a showcase of ideas. This is a private members bill (PMB). PMBs are primarily campaigning techniques to build support and spark debate. It will not be passed through parliament (in its current form).

  INTRODUCTION

  Thank you for posting. (And thank you for sharing a draft of your post with me before posting so I could start drafting this reply).

  I have been the main person from the EA community working on the bill campaign. I have never been in the driving seat for the bill but I have had some influence over it.

  I agree with many of the points raised. At a high level I agree for example that there is no “compelling evidence” that this bill work work as planned. Society has not worked out how to fix short-termism in policy making. I do however think this is an important enough issue that we should try to address it with a Future Generations Bill (similar to this one). I think statements in this post like “if the Bill were passed as currently drafted, it could significantly damage short and long term welfare” are unjustified by the text and overstated given the degree of evidence.

  Overall I think there seems to be some confusion in this post about what the bill is doing and trying to achieve (acting as a rallying point) and what it is not doing (being passed in Parliament). So I will briefly run though an explanation of the bill and then respond to specific points made by the post above before drawing a conclusion.

  AN EXPLANATION

  1. THE GOOD: What is the Future Generations Bill doing?

  The theory of change for the bill is:

  A: The UK government doesn’t make a long-term plan. Some bits of government have long-term (~10year) plans (NHS, Foreign Policy) but many do not, and certainly there is no single coherent long-term UK strategy document.

  B: Long term planning has some key features, in particular:
  • Setting coherent long term goals
  • Setting intermediate objectives that if achieved move us towards the long term goal
  • Working towards those objectives/​goals
  • Tracking progress towards that objectives/​goals

  C: Some politically neutral oversight /​ input is extremely helpful to long-term planning in government. This view is based on senior policy experts’ views of cases where long term planning appears to have gone well in the UK, all of which appear to have this feature (the IPA, the CCC, the NCSC, the BoE, etc).

  +

  D: Put in place legislation that requires the government to do long term planning:
  • The government to set a high level long-term goal (“wellbeing goals”). A advisory public consultation (“national conversation”) would be best policy making practice for this.
  • Each department to set intermediate goals (“wellbeing objectives”).
  • Tracking progress towards the goals and objectives.
  • Some form of non-political oversight.

  ↓

  E: A government that is better at planning for the long-term

  This is the core of the Wellbeing of Future Generations Bill.

  I don’t think anyone knows with any certainty how to fix political short termism . Integrating these core ideas into government policy making (maybe with a bill) represents perhaps my best guess at how to get a government to work long term (without radical change). Evidence from the Welsh bill is mixed but there is some evidence that the bill there is having a positive effect on creating a long-term thinking culture among policy makers.

  Research into this can be seen in the “Past research” section here, the report here, the forum post here and eventually the upcoming inquiry mentioned here. Note that none of the critiques in this post really seem to be against these core ideas. (So, hopefully we are all roughly on the same page with this bit.)

  So then, what is all the other stuff in the bill, why the challenges with this draft?

  2. THE BAD: So what about all the other bits of the bill about surveying school children or involving the courts and what about the length or the vagueness of the bill?

  The current draft of the bill is a campaign tool. It will not become law. The Bill has been laid in Parliament as a House of Lords Private Members Bill (PMB).

  The bill was not written by trained legal drafters. In government, when I worked on drafting a statutory instrument, it took about 6 months and involved multiple lawyers and a range of technical experts. Meanwhile any Parliamentarian can lay legislation in Parliament for debate – but they don’t get the lawyers or technical experts (maybe an hour or two of time from Table Office). The Bill was mostly drafted by the campaign staff of Lord Bird. To get this drafted they took the Welsh Bill as a template and then added and subtracted from that, often by looking at other bills and seeing what could be copied over. (In fact I found at least one typo in the earlier version that was laid in parliament.)

  This draft of the bill will not become UK law. Most PMBs go nowhere and are never heard of. As far as I know no house of Lords private members bill passes through the House of Commons to become law except where they can pass completely unopposed without debate (e.g. 2019 on FGM and 2015 on the House of Lords expulsion rules). That seems extremely unlikely for this bill.

  This draft of the bill is a shopping list of ideas. This bill is primarily a campaigning tool to spark debate and build support for an idea. And so a strategic decision was made by Lords Bird’s team to, rather than have a nice short bill, INCLUDE ALL THE IDEAS: legal powers, prevention targets, consulting school children, rules on companies (not in the current draft), etc. Now in my view this makes a bill worse, but also more popular. Worse: for example it does (in my view) not need independent oversight from a new Parliamentary Committee AND a new Commissioner AND 2 existing arm’s length bodies AND the public (via the courts)!! More popular: politicians (even those on the right) want to support a bill with their ideas in it, even if it has some other ideas in it, so more ideas → more supporters.

  Given the above I think the drafting of the bill deserves to be given some slack. Personally this is not be the approach I would have taken (I mean I am an EA policy nerd who prefers a short tightly drafted pieces of work I can 100% stand by), but I am not sure that this was the wrong tactic to have taken. It does open up the bill to criticisms on much of the fluff – but at the same time it seems to have worked to build support from a lot of MPs across political parties.

  [Edit added for clarity: I don’t think the bill is net bad and yet support it anyway as a campaign device. I think the bill could be better drafted but is still a net good (the benefits outweigh costs)]

  3. THE BEAUTIFUL: Is it doing good or not?

  Most private members’ bills fade into obscurity this one has not. There have been over 266 media pieces, with a global reach of 92 million. There has been support from 70+ MPs and 40+ Peers. A Conservative MP is taking forward the Bill in the House of Commons.

  There has been interest from local authorities and devolved administrations. These places are where innovative policy change ideas should happen and be tested. There have been commitments for a Future Generations policy from the Mayor of Yorkshire and the Scottish Government.

  It is unclear how much the bill has been useful for the APPG for Future Generations, but it has helped a bit in growing supporters and the APPG has led to change in ways that people on this Forum would be excited about such as the government committing to improve its approach to managing extreme risks (link).

  So definitely not a perfect bill but beautiful in its own way.

  RESPONSES TO SPECIFIC POINTS

  The bill is not perfect but there was often a strategic reason for the Bill being drafted as it is. I also think John and Larks tend to overstate/​exaggerate how bad the problems are without providing supporting evidence. I respond to a few points below.

  superficial analysis

  Mostly disagree. There has been significant analysis see here, here, and here. More would still be good.

  Without any plausible theory of change

  Disagree. There is a very clear theory of change described above. I admit this had not been written publicly prior to now. (I offered to write this up for the authors prior to them posting this article.)

  Existential risk neglect.

  Disagree. This was deliberate. My biggest impact on the draft was to add in this section on risks. At the time of drafting I consulted with staff at CSER who advised the bill should use “global risks” rather than “existential risks”. I believe they felt it was better to avoid the “existential risks” brand in this bill.

  [Should push for] CLTR suggestions for three lines of defence

  Strongly agree. (Note I might be bias as I am the author of that section of the CLTR paper.)

  Vague language …

  should write laws to try to guard against future actors’ attempts to creatively interpret them

  Weakly disagree. Vague language is a tool that legislators sometimes deliberately use to achieve goals. It has pros and cons. It can increase uncertainty but is used to create legislation that can be adaptive to changing future needs. For example see the GAAR and maybe the ideas here in this white paper.

  If this bill is to be an experiment then it needs to be able to be adaptable, to give powers to future Ministers to develop the specifics (And ideally set a date for review and evaluation, which it does not do, which is a genuine problem with it!). Given this context it is not clear that the vagueness of the wording is bad. Also note that a good way to mitigate any negative consequences of vagueness is by requiring a government body to issue further guidance, as is done in this draft bill.

  I see no evidence to believe that vagueness will lead to an increased risk of “blocking things that were not intended to be blocked, or requiring things that were not intended to be required” in this context.

  For example, consider the ‘sustainable development’ duty the Bill introduces on public bodies:

  Neutral. I agree this definition is clearly hard to work with. However for context this definition of “sustainable development” was chosen because it is commonly used (it is the definition introduced by the UN in 1987 and widely used since then) which has the advantage of people already being familiar with it.
  

  problem is that the Bill makes the judiciary the ultimate arbiter of the duties proposed

  Agree. I would remove this from the Bill if it was solely up to me.

  Hurts infrastructure investment

  Weekly agree. As I mention above the current draft of the bill has 5 mechanisms for oversight and I expect this shopping list approach is too much and could lead to vetocracy.

  On the other hand this bill could also SUPPORT more new infrastructure. The bill should facilitate long-term thinking, it the core elements of the bill are in part modelled on things that have lead to more infrastructure in the past (the IPA and the NIC). If the government’s stated long-term goals includes environmental protection (and national identity) over infrastructure (as with the Welsh example) then the bill should lead to that and if the government’s stated long-term goals include more infrastructure then the bill should help facilitate that. The bill makes no attempt to comment on what long-term goals should be in place, only to provide a framework to achieving them.

  Red tape /​ makes procurement worse

  Neutral. This is a risk but a very small one. Readers of the bill will note that for most red tape policies the drafters also included a line in the bill saying the policy was optional. For example for impact assessments (the only bit that affects procurement) departments can just not do them and say why they are not doing the. Yes this seems odd at first glance (why even include them) but it makes sense if you see the bill as a campaign tool to spark debate on a long list of policy ideas.

  Regulatory capture

  Disagree. This part of the critique seems tangential to the whole point of the bill. The bill does not exist to stop political pressures on policy or ensure a fully equal society, etc, ect. The bill makes no attempt to comment on what long-term goals should be in place, only to provide a framework to achieving them.

  Missed opportunity for bipartisanship

  Slightly agree. The bill does have fairly strong bi-partisan support but I do think more could have been done to engage the libertarian right. I do think this is harder than expected. The bill team engaged with a lot of right wing politicians including getting feedback some very senior ex-politicians. There is still a tendency for people to want to add their ideas rather than take out ideas. Also honestly they don’t say what you might naïvely expect, for example one of the ideas that did not go in following consultation with politicians on the political right was actually an idea Larks and John mention: about having the consultation involve more focus groups to get public opinions on trade-offs. (That the government does not back the bill is expect for a PMB).

  Makes EAs looks bad

  This is an odd critique. The bill is not EA led so I am not sure it should reflect on the EA community. In fact the idea for the Welsh bill predates the EA community. There has been one tweet critical of EA and linking EA and the bill (and to me that one Tweet did not look like it was made it good faith, it was rude, assumed incompetence, and contained no good arguments against the bill, of which there are plenty. Can add details if wanted).

  [Edit added: supporters have exaggerated the size and fervour of support]

  [Edit added: I think this would be bad but I know of no-one doing this and don’t know what this refers to.]

  Risk of an echo chamber

  Disagree. There was broad consultation across UK political and policy groups, including some EA organisations. It is not clear that a post on the EA forum by me would have had much effect or that the drafting team (in Lord Bird’s office) could have been persuaded to post on this forum. Also such engagement might just have increased the chance of the bill being associated with EA by critiques.

  Sector-specific approaches may be needed

  Agree. I like this bit. In fact it aligns with the current approach to the bill campaign that the secretariat to the APPG for Future Generations is taking, as of August last year. See here.

  Ultimately, we think the base rate is that many efforts to improve policy in the last 50 years have ended in failure or worse. [Edited, was misquoted]We think the base rate is that most efforts to improve governance have ended in failure or worse

  Disagree. This is an interesting claim I would like to see evidence for. If you think that the UK government today works better than it did 10 or 50 or 100 years ago then it seems false that most attempts to improve things do more harm than good.

  OVERALL
  
  I agree with some of the criticisms made in this post, but think many others are overstated. I thank the authors for their interest and feedback. Ultimately we do not know how to fix political short-termism but integrating something along the lines of the core elements of this bill into UK policy making seems like a reasonable thing to try. This specific drafting of this bill is not perfect – but to say it is so bad that it will cause significant harm is an overstatement given the evidence available. Either way this exact draft will not pass parliament but it has already sparked debate and successfully engaged politicians across both sides of the political spectrum. Overall I support this bill.

  I am open to more feedback discussion and debate.

Some con­cerns about policy work fund­ing and the Long Term Fu­ture Fund

• weeatquince 13 Apr 2022 8:03 UTC

  114 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Free-spend­ing EA might be a big prob­lem for op­tics and epistemics

  Extra ideas for the idea list:

  • Altruistic perks, rather than personal perks. E.g.1. Turn up at this student event and got $10 donated to a charity of your choice. E.g.2. donation matching schemes mentioned in job adverts, perhaps funded by offering maybe slightly lower salaries. Anecdotally I remember the first EAish event I went to had money to charity for each attendee and free wine and it was the money to charity that attracted me to go, and free wine that attracted my friend, and I am still here and they are not involved.

  • Frugality options, like an optional version of the above idea. E.g.1. when signing up to an EA event the food options could be: “[]vegan, []nut free, []gluten free, []frugal—will bring my own lunch please donate money saved to charity x”. E.g.2. Jobs could advertise the organisation offers salary sacrifice schemes that some employees take. I don’t know how well this would work but would be interested to see a group try. Anecdotally I know some EAs in well paid jobs take lower salaries than they are offered but I don’t think this is well known.

  Also for what it is worth I was really impressed by the post. I it was an very well written, clear, and transparent discussion of this topic with clear actions to take.

Con­ver­gence the­sis be­tween longter­mism and neartermism

Manag­ing risk in the EA policy space

APPG on Fu­ture Gen­er­a­tions im­pact re­port – Rais­ing the pro­file of fu­ture gen­er­a­tion in the UK Parliament

• weeatquince 29 Dec 2021 20:48 UTC

  83 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Democratis­ing Risk—or how EA deals with critics

  Everything written in the post above strongly resonates with my own experiences, in particular the following lines:

  the creation of this paper has not signalled epistemic health. It has been the most emotionally draining paper we have ever written.

  the burden of proof placed on our claims was unbelievably high in comparison to papers which were considered less “political” or simply closer to orthodox views.

  The EA community prides itself on being able to invite and process criticism. However, warm welcome of criticism was certainly not our experience in writing this paper.

  I think criticism of EA orthodoxy is routinely dismissed. I would like to share a few more stories of being publicly critical of EA in the hope that doing so adds some useful evidence to the discussion:

  • Consider systemic change. “Some critics of effective altruism allege that its proponents have failed to engage with systemic change” (source). I have always found the responses (eg here and here) to this critique to be dismissive and miss the point. Why can we not just say: yes we are a new community this area feels difficult and we are not there yet? Why do we have to pretend EA is perfect and does systemic change stuff well?

  • My own experience (risk planning). I have some relevant expertise from engaging with professional risk managers, military personnel, counterterrorism staff and so on. I have really rally struggled to communicate any of this to EA folk, especially where it suggest that EAs are not thinking about risks well. I tend to find I get downvoted or told I am strawmanning EA. If I want to avoid it is is possible if I put huge amounts of time and mental energy.

  • Mental health. Consider that Michael Plant has, for 6 years now, been making the case that GiveWell and other neartermist EAs don’t put enough weight on mental health. I believe his experience is mostly one of feeling that people are dismissive rather than engage with him.

  • Other. A few years back I remember being unimpressed that EAs response to Iason Gabriel’s critique was largely to argue back and ignore it. There was no effort to see if any of the criticisms contained useful grains of truth that could help us improve EA.

  Other evidence to note is that the top thing that EAs thinks other EAs get (source) is “Reinventing the wheel” and “Overconfidence and misplaced difference” and many EAs worry that EA is intellectually stale /​ stagnant (in answers to this question). On the other hand many EA orgs are very good at recognising their mistakes made (e.g with ‘Our mistakes’ pages), which is a great cultural thing that we as a community should be proud of.

  I think we should also recognise that Both Carla and Luke have full time EA research jobs and they have found it time consuming and for someone without a full time position it can become almost impossibly time consuming and draining to do a half decent job. This essentially closes off a lot of people from critiquing EA.

  If there was one change I would make I would like there to be a cultural shift so if someone posts something critical we try to steelman it rather than dismiss it. (Here is an example of steelmanning some of Phil Torres’ arguments [edit: although we should of course not knowingly steelman/​endorse arguments made in bad faith]). We could also on occasion say “yes we get this wrong and we still have much to learn” and not treat every critique as an attack.

  Hope some extra views help.

  What links here?

  • A.C.Skraeling's comment on Cli­mate Change & Longter­mism: new book-length report by John G. Halstead (29 Aug 2022 7:08 UTC; -5 points)

• weeatquince 21 Apr 2020 8:44 UTC

  80 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: What will 80,000 Hours provide (and not provide) within the effec­tive al­tru­ism com­mu­nity?

  In many ways this post leaves me feeling disappointed that 80,000 Hours has turned out the way it did and is so focused on long-term future career paths.

  - -

  Over the last 5 years I have spent a fair amount of time in conversation with staff at CEA and with other community builders about creating communities and events that are cause-impartial.

  This approach is needed for making a community that is welcoming to and supportive of people with different backgrounds, interests and priorities; for making a cohesive community where people with varying cause areas feel they can work together; and where each individual is open-minded and willing to switch causes based on new evidence about what has the most impact.

  I feel a lot of local community builders and CEA have put a lot of effort into this aspect of community building.
  

  - -
  Meanwhile it seems that 80000 Hours has taken a different tack. They have been more willing, as part of trying to do the most good, to focus on the causes that the staff at 80000 Hours think are most valuable.

  Don’t get me wrong I love 80000 Hours, I am super impressed by their content glad to see them doing well. And I think there is a good case to be made for the cause-focused approach they have taken.

  However, in my time as a community builder (admittedly a few years ago now) I saw the downsides of this. I saw:

  • People drifting from EA. Eg: someone telling me, they were no longer engaging with the EA community because they felt that it was now all long-term future focused and point to 80000 Hours as the evidence.

  • People feeling that they needed to pretend to be long-termism focused to get support from the EA community . Eg: someone telling me they wanted career coaching “read between the lines and pretended to be super interested in AI”.

  • Personally feeling uncomfortable because it seemed to me that my 80000 Hours career coach had a hidden agenda to push me to work on AI rather than anything else (including paths that progressed by career yet kept my options more open to different causes).

  • Concerns that the EA community is doing a bait-and-switch tactic of “come to us for resources on how to do good. Actually, the answer is this thing and we knew all along and were just pretending to be open to your thing.”

  - -

  “80,000 Hours’ online content is also serving as one of the most common ways that people get introduced to the effective altruism community”

  So, Ben, my advice to you would firstly to be to be super proud of what you have achieved. But also to be aware of the challenges that 80000 Hours’ approach makes for building a welcoming and cohesive community. I am really glad that 20% of content on the podcast and the job board goes into broader areas than your priority paths and would encourage you to find ways that 80000 Hours can put more effort into these areas, do some more online content on these areas and to think carefully about how to avoid the risks of damaging the EA brand or the EA community.

  And best of luck with the future.

List of dona­tion op­por­tu­ni­ties (fo­cus: non-US longter­mist policy work)

Where are you donat­ing this year and why – in 2019? Open thread for dis­cus­sion.

• weeatquince 31 Jan 2023 9:32 UTC

  68 points

  26 ∶ 11

  on: We’re no longer “paus­ing most new longter­mist fund­ing com­mit­ments”

  Thanks for the useful post Holden.

  I think it would be great to see the full published tiered list.

  In global health and development funders (i.e. OpenPhil and Givewell) are very specific about the bar and exactly who they think is under it and who they think is over it. Recently global development funders (well GiveWell) have even actively invited open constructive criticism and debate about their decision making. It would be great to have the same level of transparency (and openness to challenge) for longtermist grant making.

  Is there a plan to publish the full tiered list? If not what’s the reason /​ best case against having it public?

  To flag some of the advantages

  • Those of us who are creating new projects would have a much better understanding of what OpenPhil would fund and be able to create better more aligned projects to OpenPhil’s goals. The EA community lacks a strong longtermist incubator and this is I expect one of the challenges.

  • Other funders could fill gaps that they believe OpenPhil has missed, or otherwise use OpenPhil’s tiers in their decision making.

  • It allows OpenPhil to receive useful constructive feedback or critiques.

  What links here?

  • Should the main text of the write-ups of Open Philan­thropy’s large grants be longer than 1 para­graph? by Vasco Grilo (31 Mar 2024 9:04 UTC; 49 points)

• weeatquince 20 Dec 2022 14:29 UTC

  66 points

  18 ∶ 0

  on: A Case for Vol­un­tary Abor­tion Reduction

  Thank you for writing. I had question about this come up a few times when I was community building so it is helpful to see an effective altruism discussion on the topic.

  – –

  One area of your post that confuses me, where (intuitively) I disagree with you is on your push back against family planning charities.

  My understanding is that the charities you mention, Family Empowerment Media and Maternal Health Initiative, are trying to empower women with knowledge about and access to contraception. This supports women’s autonomy and right to decide on their family, and is good for maternal health and childhood health (due to more spaced out births). Neither charity has that I know of made a stance for or against abortion and they do not work on abortions, but my assumption would be that more deliberate use of contraception would mean less unwanted pregnancies and less abortions. So, if you care about the moral value of embryos then supporting access to contraception could be among the most effective places to donate.

  So, I would have expected you to advocate people donate more to these charities not less.
  
  (I can see a case for not donating to such charities out of moral uncertainty reasons but I could also see a case for avoiding working at all on abortion reduction for moral uncertainty reasons so not really sure where to take that line of argument).

  Disclaimer: I work for Charity Entrepreneurship, the organisation that incubated both of the above charities. All views are my own and do not represent Charity Entrepreneurship or anyone else.

How to think about an un­cer­tain fu­ture: les­sons from other sec­tors & mis­takes of longter­mist EAs

APPG for Fu­ture Gen­er­a­tions Im­pact Re­port 2020 − 2021

• weeatquince 5 Oct 2019 17:40 UTC

  58 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Some per­sonal thoughts on EA and sys­temic change

  In one key way this post very solidly completely misses the point.
  
  The post makes a number of very good points about systemic change. But bases all of the points on financial cost-effective estimates. It is embedded in the language throughout, discussing: options that “outperformed GiveWell style charities”, the “cost … per marginal vote”, lessons for “large-scale spending” or for a “small donor”, etc.
  
  I think a way the EA community has neglected systemic change in exactly in this manner. Money is not the only thing that can be leveraged in the world to make change (and in some cases money is not a thing people can give).
  I think this some part of what people are pointing to when they criticise EA.
  
  To be constructive I think we should rethink cause priotisation, but not from a financial point of view. Eg:
  - If you have political power how best to spend it?
  - If you have a public voice how best to use it?
  - If you can organise activism what should it focus on?
  
  (PS. Happy to support with money or time people doing this kind of research)
  
  I think we could get noticeably different results. I think things like financial stability (hard to donate to but very important) might show up as more of a priority in the EA space if we start looking at things this way.
  
  I think the EA community currently has a limited amount to say to anyone with power. For example:
  • I met the civil servant with oversight of UK’s £8bn international development spending who seemed interested in EA but did not feel it was relevant to them – I think they were correct, I had nothing to say they didn’t already know.
  • Another case is an EA I know who does not have a huge amount to donate but lots of experience in political organising and activism, I doubt the EA community provides them much useful direction.
  
  It is not that the EA community does none of this, just that we are slow. It feels like it took 80000 Hours a while to start recommending policy/​politics as a career path and it is still unclear what people should do once in positions of power. (HIPE.org.uk if doing some research on this for Government careers)
  
  --
  Overall a very interesting post. Thank you for posting.

  I note you mention a “relative gap in long-termist and high-risk global poverty work”. I think this is interesting. I would love it if anyone has the time to do some back of the envelope evaluations of international development governance reform organisations (like Transparency International)

  What links here?

  • Manag­ing risk in the EA policy space by weeatquince (9 Dec 2019 13:32 UTC; 89 points)
  • weeatquince's comment on Democratis­ing Risk—or how EA deals with critics by CarlaZoeC (29 Dec 2021 20:48 UTC; 83 points)

Coron­avirus and long term policy [UK fo­cus]