Why long-run focused effective altruism is more common sense

Moderate long-run EA doesn't look close to having fully formed ideas to me, and therefore it seems to me a strange way to introduce people to EA more generally.

you’ll want to make investments in technology

I don't understand this. Is there an appropriate research fund to donate to? Or are we talking about profit-driven capital spending? Or just going into applied science research as part of an otherwise unremarkable career?

and economic growth

Who knows how to make economies grow?

This will mean better global institutions, smarter leaders, more social science

What is a "better" global institution, and is there any EA writing on plans to make any such institutions better? (I don't mean this to come across as entirely critical -- I can imagine someone being a bureaucrat or diplomat at the next WTO round or something. I just haven't seen any concrete ideas floated in this direction. Is there a corner of EA websites that I'm completely oblivious to? A Facebook thread that I missed (quite plausible)?)

I have even less idea of how you plan to make better politicians win elections.

More social science I can at least understand: more policy-relevant knowledge --> hopefully better policy-making.

Underlying some of what you write is, I think, the idea that political lobbying or activism (?) could be highly effective. Or maybe going into the public service to craft policy. And that might well be right, and it would perhaps put this wing of EA, should it develop, comfortably within the sort of common-sense ideas that you say it would. (I say "perhaps" because the most prominent policy idea I see in EA discussions -- I might be biased because I agree with and read a lot of it -- is open borders, which is decidedly not mainstream.)

But overall I just don't see where this hypothetical introduction to EA is going to go, at least until the Open Philanthropy Project has a few years under its belt.

"Long-run focused effective altruism is often seen as even less common-sense than the short-run focused version."

I'd say that it is less 'common sense' as such, in terms of principles, although I agree that taking into account factors like economic/technological growth and the sustainability of civilization might lead recommending some interventions that are more broadly supported. That would be something of a coincidence, and there may also be very outlandish recommendations..

On the intuitiveness of principles, there are a many factors that separately contribute to people's intuitions.

A big part of 'common sense' for many people is focus on their own communities, and so neglect of physically and socially distant foreigners. Things like nuclear disarmament or scientific research will be less counterintuitive to many rich country citizens because of the visible impact on the welfare of their own communities.

A different but related angle is mutualism: cooperating on Prisoner's Dilemma, contributing to public goods in a way that benefits everyone, versus one-sided transfers. The costs of cutting carbon emissions, or boosting scientific research, could be allocated around the world such that everyone wins. For transfers and health aid to the poorest the mechanisms for mutual benefit are weaker and harder to implement (although possible). Immigration with taxes and transfers to approach Pareto-improvement may fit in better with the mutualistic framework.

Intuitions about sustainability over time and high average standards of living are more common than linear concern with population size (intrinsically, for a given standard of living and instrumental import).

In some cases these will tend to coincide with a long-run welfare view, and in other cases with a short-run welfare view.

This is the approach I take when talking to people about effective altruism, based partly on caring more about it, and partly on the observation that it goes over better with some audiences (e.g. academics, with whom I have a lot of contact).

It also seems surprising that people go straight from poverty to existential risk reduction, often without pausing in the middle to appreciate the massive long-term humanitarian impacts of tech progress. (I got here via poverty, then concern about faster tech progress for humanitarian benefits, and then only after a long time became interested in existential risk.) As others have pointed out, I think this is a bit of a historical coincidence.

I think what this post highlights for me is that we (or at least I) would like to see more work done on "donation risk" within the EA community, and how we allocate and make giving investments in causes with potentially large effects but uncertain upsides.

For short run causes, we basically accept almost no donation risk - you must show that your organisation uses all the money effectively towards a cause that actually works and delivers the upside you have promised. Even slight delays or hiccups (like AMF struggling to allocate funds this year) are sufficient to prompt donors to look elsewhere. For extremely long run causes my perception is the exact opposite, but perhaps I should not comment, because I don't support most current work into them.

What about medium run causes, should we look at donation risk like the short-run or do we treat them more like the extreme long run? For many such cases - a big difference is that an organisation like 80,000 hours seems only to have have a lack of evidence because it is new. If/when it becomes more mature and its students go on to take or not take their advice, a better picture of its effectiveness might emerge. Likewise with projects like the OPP where we may well get a better picture of the good it is doing over time, so I am quite positive about them in a venture capitalist sort of way.

Medium run erisk and political projects face donation risk difficulties though. We can see the upsides are big but showing our contribution actually mattered and that we are doing the best job working towards it is very hard.

When people see effective altruists focused on cash transfers, distributing bed-nets and cheap medicine - and claiming they’re doing the most good - there’s a common reaction: "This looks naive and narrow : Sure these interventions help the immediate beneficiaries, but they hardly look like they’re solving the world’s greatest problems. "

This is only anecdotal evidence, but I and a few others who've tried pitching people on these interventions haven't got that reaction. More broadly, I'm curious as to what your evidence is that this is contrary to "common-sense do-gooding". Many non-EAs I know find it common sense, and say that they knew that bednets were a great giving opportunity, and that they've thought that they should donate to them before I suggested it.

It looks like they’ve [...] ignored the historical record (in which science, technology and better government are some of the main drivers of progress)

That is the historical record, but it's not obvious that thinking that we should give to global poverty charities ignores it or is refuted by it. You'd need to make an argument that a particular, individual sort of work that was available in the past did the most good, and that this is good evidence that an analogous sort of work (e.g. creating a generic tech start-up) will do more good than spending those resources on deworming or bednets or cash transfers.

More broadly, there is an interpretation of common sense which is cautious, empirical, friendly to global poverty charities, and sceptical about at least some x-risk interventions. But I suspect that it's fruitless to debate whether this interpretation is correct or not. People can mean many different things by the phrase "common sense", and these will often bear a distinct resemblance to what the person thinks themself. (We could try to work out what the average person thinks, or would think after suitable reflection. It's not obvious how much weight we should give to that, but it's certainly worth taking into account to some extent. I suspect that they're open to seeing global poverty charities as the best, and wouldn't be sold on many particular far future interventions, but I really don't know.)

1. What's the difference between moderate and long term EA? I'm guessing x-risk would be long term and perhaps some kind of research, medium term?

2. As your second footnote suggested, I think that the short vs long term debate really boils down to a low vs high risk one. Just like people have different tastes for risk level in their financial investments, so to in their philanthropic investments. Long term goals such as developing technology or x-risk I don't think anyone thinks are unimportant, they're simply unpredictable (high risk), whereas GiveWell-type charities don't fix systemic probs but more “safe.”

3. Related to #2 is diversification. People diversify their financial investments because low risk doesn't yield that much whereas high yield is also high risk, so they hold various levels of risk in their portfolio (or even within the same risk level, it's lower risk to have multiple investments, of course). This even makes sense if someone wanted to hold only high risk (long term) donations in their philanthropic portfolio: they may feel that putting all their money on, for instance, fighting corruption, is a long shot, so may feel comfort in giving half their donations to promoting morals. In this case, the risk level is still high, but it will give the donor the psychological comfort that he has TWO chances of improving the world, rather that just one!

4. You associate long term EA with weirdness, and I agree that the public would see AI, and some other forms of x-risk that way, but there are so many other long-term high impact pursuits that are not weird: research on behavioural economics; designing technologies that help the poor along with their distribution and marketing systems; decreasing corruption including political reform; restructuring our economic and monetary systems to make them more fair and egalitarian; promoting more moral or sustainable lifestyles like veganism; lobbying; green tech; medical tech. I don't think people would find any of these weird.

5. As someone on the forum stated earlier, people tend to be more motivated to make the world better, rather than deal with sad things like extreme poverty. I think that's probably true. When promoting EA, would it not be ideal to have a little “something for everybody”? ie. For those with bleeding hearts, immediate measures for helping the global poor; for tech-oriented people developing high-impact technologies; for “save the world from injustice” types, combating corruption. It's unacceptable to me that someone would reject philanthropy or direct EA altogether because the person teaching her about it was dismissive of her place on the risk-type-duration spectrum. We should be empowering everyone, not trying to get them to conform to a specific form of EA!

I get the general sense that the field of development economics is starting to ask the bigger questions again, often using different techniques than randomization. This is from an interesting blog post I read recently:

Economic development is about the transition of whole economies from low-productivity, poor places into high-productivity industrial economies. This transition encompasses several aspects: a move out of agriculture and into manufacturing or services, urbanization, declining fertility rates, integration with global markets. Current research in development economics – the RCTs and their like – does not study the transition. “What will make these people better off today?” is a different question than “What will make this economy develop?”.

This type of criticism has been around for a long time (Rodrik, Blattman), but it seems to be gaining more traction now.

Great point Ben!

A lot of what is now the effective altruism movement was fed from the community focused on rationality formed around Less Wrong, who were already largely concerned with the risks of superintelligent A.I. As they were also the section of effective altruism most concerned with all of the far future, concerns about superintelligent A.I. dominated as an example of an effective focus area aside from charity focused on the very short-run like charities recommended by Givewell. Frankly, before this point I'm not sure that we had good examples of "moderate long-run effective altruism" aside from those generated in this post. Indeed, the collaborative projects between different organizations you mentioned are doing pioneering research into global prioritization. I believe this may be a sign the movement is growing, not in the sense of having greater numbers and popular appeal, but in terms of what its learning. Hopefully the latter type of growth will lead to more of the former as what the movement is doing becomes more commonly sensible.