Is the EA community really advocating principles over conclusions ?

Kudos for bringing this up, I think it's an important area!

Do we, as a community, sometimes lean more toward unconsciously advocating specific outcomes rather than encouraging people to discover their own conclusions through the EA framework?

There's a lot to this question.

I think that many prestigious/important EAs have come to similar conclusions. If you've come to think that X is important, it can seem very reasonable to focus on promoting and working with people to improve X.

You'll see some discussions of "growing the tent" - this can often mean "partnering with groups that agree with the conclusions, not necessarily with the principles". 

One question here is something like, "How effective is it to spend dedicated effort on explorations that follow the EA principles, instead of just optimizing for the best-considered conclusions?" This is something that arguably there would need to be more dedicated effort in order to really highlight. I think we just don't have all too much work in this area now, compared to more object-level work. 

Perhaps another factor seemed to have been that FTX has stained the reputation of EA and hurt CEA - after which there was a period where there seemed to be less attention on EA, and more on specific causes like AI safety. 

In terms of "What should the EA community do", I'd flag that a lot of the decisions are really made by funders and high-level leaders. It's not super clear to me how much agency the "EA community" has, in ways that aren't very aligned with these groups. 

All that said, I think it's easy for us to generally be positive towards people who take the principles in ways that don't match the specific current conclusions.

I personally am on the side that thinks that current conclusions are probably overconfident and lacking in some very important considerations.

I agree with you that EA often implicitly endorses conclusions, and that this can be pernicious and sometimes confusing to newcomers. Here’s a really interesting debate on whether biodiversity loss should be an EA cause area, for example.

A lot of forms of global utilitarianism do seem to tend to converge on the ‘big 3’ cause areas of Global Health & Development, Animal Welfare, and Global Catastrophic Risks. If you generally value things like ‘saving lives’ or ‘reducing suffering’, you’ll usually end up at one of these (and most people seem to decide between them based on risk tolerance, assumptions about non-human moral values, or tractability—rather than outcome values). Under this perspective, it could be reasonable to dismiss cause areas that don’t fit into this value framework.

But this highlights where I think part of the problem lies, which is that value systems that lie outside of this can be good targets for effective altruism. If you value biodiversity for its own sake, it’s not unreasonable to ask ‘how can we save the greatest number of valuable species from going extinct?’. Or you might be a utilitarian, but only interested in a highly specific outcome, and ask ‘how can I prevent the most deaths from suicide?’. Or ‘how can I prevent the most suffering in my country?’—which you might not even do for value-system reasons, but because you have tax credits to maximise!

I wish EA were more open to this, especially as a movement that recognises the value of moral uncertainty. IMHO, some people in that biodiversity loss thread are bit too dismissive, and I think we’ve probably lost some valuable partners because of it! But I understand the appeal of wanting easy answers, and not spending too much time overthinking your value system (I feel the same!).

Re: agency of the community itself, I've been trying to get to this "pure" form of EA in my university group, and to be honest, it felt extremely hard.

-People who want to learn about EA often feel confused and suspicious until you get to object-level examples. "Ok, impactful career, but concretely, where would that get me? Can you give me an example?". I've faced real resistance when trying to stay abstract.

-It's hard to keep people's attention without talking about object-level examples, be it for teaching abstract concepts. It's even harder once you get to the "projects" phase of the year.

-People anchor hard on some specific object-level examples after that. "Oh, EA ? The malaria thing?" (Despite my go-to examples included things as diverse as shrimp welfare and pandemic preparedness)

-When it's not an object-level example, it's usually "utilitarianism" or "Peter Singer", which act a lot as thought stoppers and have an "eek" vibe for many people.

-People who care about non-typical causes actually have a hard time finding data and making estimates.

-In addition to that, agency for really making estimates is hard to build up. One member I knew thought the most Impactful career choice he had was potentially working on nuclear fusion. I suggested him to find out about the Impact-Tractability-Neglectedness of it to compare to another option he had (even rough OOMs) as well as more traditional ones. I can't remember him giving any numbers even months later. When he just mentioned he felt sure about the difference, I didn't feel comfortable arguing about the robustness of his justification. It's a tough balance to strike between respecting preferences and probing reasons.

-A lot of it comes down to career 1:1s. Completing the ~8 or so parts is already demanding. You have to provide estimates that are nowhere to be found if your center of interest is "niche" in EA. You then have to find academic and professional opportunities as well as relations that are not referenced anywhere in the EA community (I had to reach back to the big brother of a primary school friend I had lost track of to get a fusion engineer he could talk to!). If you need funding, even if your idea is promising, you need excellent communication skills for writing a convincing blog post, plausibly enough research skills to get non-air-plucked estimates for ITN / cost-effectiveness analysis, and a desire to go to EAGs and convince people who could just not care. Moreover a lot of people expressly limit themselves to their own country or continent. It's often easier to stick to the usual topics (I get call for applications for AIS fellowships almost every months, of course I never had ones about niche topics)

-Another point about career 1:1s, the initial list of options to compare is hard to negotiate. Some people will neglect non-EA options, others will neglect EA options, and I had issues with artificially adding options to help them truly compare options.

-Another other point, some people barely have the time to come to a few sessions. It's hard to get them to actually rely on the methodological tools they haven't learned about in order to compare their options during career 1:1s.

-A good way to cope with all of this is to encourage students to start things out -to create an org rather than joining one. But not everyone has the necessary motivation for this.

I'm still happy with having started the year with epistemics, rationality, ethics and meta-ethics, and to have done other sessions on intervention and policy evaluation, suffering and consciousness, and population ethics. I didn't desperately need to have sessions on GHD / Animal Welfare/ AI Safety, thought they're definitely "in demand".

I’m glad you mustered the courage to post this! I think it’s a great post.

I agree that, in practice, people advocating for effective altruism can implicitly argue for the set of popular EA causes (and they do this quite often?), which could repel people with useful insight. Additionally, it seems to be the case that people in the EA community can be dismissive of newcomers’ cause prioritization (or their arguments for causes that are less popular in EA). Again, this could repel people from EA.

I have a couple of hypotheses for these observations. (I don’t think either is a sufficient explanation, but they’re both plausibly contributing factors.)

First, people might feel compelled to make EA less “abstract” by trying to provide concrete examples of how people in the EA community are “trying to do the most good they can,” possibly giving the impression that the causes, instead of the principles, are most characteristic of EA.

Second, people may be more subconsciously dismissive of new cause proposals because they’ve invested time/money into causes that are currently popular in the EA community. It’s psychologically easier to reject a new cause prioritization proposal than it is to accept it and thereby feel as though your resources have not been used with optimal effectiveness.