[Linkpost] Some Thoughts on Effective Altruism

Agreed with Mathias that the authors have a good grasp of what EA is and what causes EAs prioritize, and I appreciate how respectful the article is. Also like Mathias, I feel like I have some pretty fundamental worldview differences from the authors, so I'm not sure how well I can explain my disagreements. But I'll try my best.

The article's criticism seems to focus on the notion that EA ignores power dynamics and doesn't address the root cause of problems. This is a pretty common criticism. I find it a bit confusing, and I don't really understand what the authors consider to be root causes. For example, efforts to create cheap plant-based or cultured meat seem to address the root cause of factory farming because, if successful, they will eliminate the need to farm and kill sentient animals. AI safety work, if successful, could eliminate the root causes of all suffering and bring about an unimaginably good utopia. But the authors don't seem to agree with me that these qualify as "addressing root causes". I don't understand how they distinguish between the EA work that I perceive as addressing root causes and the things they consider to be root causes. Critics like these authors seem to want EAs to do something that they're not doing, but I don't understand what it is.

[W]ealthy EA donors [do] not [go] through a (potentially painful) personal development process to confront and come to terms with the origins of their wealth and privilege: the racial, class, and gender biases that are at the root of a productive system that has provided them with financial wealth, and their (often inadvertent) role in maintaining such systems of exploitation and oppression.

It seems to me that if rich people come to terms with the origins of their wealth, they might conclude that they don't "deserve" it any more than poor people in Kenya, and decide to distribute the money to them (via GiveDirectly) instead of spending it on themselves. Isn't that ultimately the point? What outcome would the authors like to come out of this self-reflection, if not using their wealth to help disadvantaged people?

EAs spend more time than any other group I know talking about how they are among the richest people in the world, and they should use their wealth to help the less fortunate. But this doesn't seem to count in the authors' eyes.

This article argues that EAs fixate too much on "doing the most good", and then appears to argue that they believe people should focus on addressing root causes/grassroots activism/power dynamics/etc. because it will do the most good—or maybe I'm misinterpreting the article because I'm seeing it from an EA lens. Sometimes it seems like the authors disagree with EAs about fundamental principles like maximizing good, and other times it seems like they just disagree about what does the most good. I wasn't clear on that.

If they do agree in principle that we should do as much good as possible, then I would like to see a more rigorous justification for why the authors' favored causes do more good than EA causes. I realize they're not amenable to cost-effectiveness analysis than GiveWell's top charities, but I would like to see at least some attempt at a justification.

For example, many EAs prioritize existential risk. There's no rigorous cost-effective analysis of x-risk, but you can at least make an argument that it's more cost-effective than other things:

1. Extinction is way worse than anything else.
2. Extinction is not that unlikely.
3. We can probably make significant progress on reducing extinction risk.

Bostrom basically makes this argument in Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority.

My impression is there's a worldview difference between people who think it's possible in principle to make decisions under uncertainty, and people who think it's not. I don't have much to say in defense of the former position except to vaguely gesture in the direction of Phil Tetlock and the proven track record of some people's ability to forecast uncertain outcomes.

More broadly, I would have an easier time understanding articles like these if they gave more concrete examples of what they consider to be the best things to work on, and why—something more specific than "grassroots activism". For example (not saying I think the authors believe this, just that this is the general sort of thing I'd like to see):

We should support community groups that organize meetups where they promote the idea of the fundamental unfairness of global wealth inequality. We believe that once sufficiently many people worldwide are paying attention to this problem, people will develop and move toward a new system of government that will redistribute wealth and provide basic services to everyone. We aren't sure what this government structure will look like, but we're confident that it's possible because [insert argument here]. We also believe this plan has a good chance of getting broad support because [insert argument here], and that once it has broad support, it has a good chance of actually getting implemented, because [insert argument here].

Hello, I'm Paolo, one of the authors of the article. We were pointed to this thread and we've been thrilled to witness the discussion it's been generating. Romy and I will take some time to go through all your comments in the coming days and will aim to post a follow up blog post in an attempt to answer to the various points raised more comprehensively. In the meantime, please keep posting here and keep up the good discussion! Thanks!

I think I find myself confused about it means for something to have a "single root cause."Having not thought about it too much, I personally currently think the idea looks conceptually confused. I am not a philosopher; however here are some issues I have with this conception:

1. Definitional boundaries

First of all, I think this notion of causation is kinda confused in some important ways, and it'd be surprising to have discrete cleanly-defined causes to map well to a "single root cause" in a way/idea that is easy for humans to understand.

2. Most things have multiple "root causes"

Secondly, in practice I feel like mostly things I care about are due to multiple causes, at least if 1) you only use "causes" as defined in a way that's easy for humans to understand and 2) you only go back far enough to causal chains that are possible to act on. For example, there's a sense of the root cause of factory farming obviously being the Big Bang, but in terms of things we can act on, factory farming is caused by:

1) A particular species of ape evolved to have a preference for the flesh of other animals.

2) That particular species of ape have a great deal of control over other animals, and the external environment

3) Factory farming is currently the technology that can produce meat most efficiently and cost-effectively.

4) Producers of meat (mostly) just care about production efficiency and cost-effectiveness, not animal suffering.

5) The political processes and coordination mechanisms across species is primarily through parasitism and predation rather than more cooperative mechanisms.

6) The political processes and coordination mechanisms within a particular species of ape is such that it is permissible for producers of meat to cause animal suffering.

... (presumably many others that I'm not creative/diligent enough to list).

How do we determine which of the 6+ causes are "real" root causes?

From what I understand of the general SJ/activism milieu, the perception is that interventions that attempt to change #6 counts as "systemic change," but interventions that change #1, #2 (certain forms of AI alignment), #3 (plant-based/clean meat), #4 (moral circle expansion, corporate campaigns), #5 (uplifting, Hedonistic Imperative) do not. This seems awfully suspicious to me, as if people had a predetermined conclusion.

3. Monocausal diagrams can still have intervention points to act on, and it's surprising if the best intervention point/cause is the first ("root") one.

Thirdly, even if you (controversially, in my view) can draw a clean causal diagram such that a bad action is monocausal and there's a clean chain from A->B->C->...->{ bad thing}, in practice it is still not obvious to me (and indeed would be rather surprising!) if there's a definitive status of A as the "real" root cause, in a way that's both well-defined and makes it such that A is uniquely the only thing you can act on.

It's very refreshing to read a criticism of EA that isn't chock-full of straw men.
Kudos to the authors for doing their best to represent EA fairly.
That's not usually the case for articles that accuse EA of neglecting 'systemic change'.

That said, their worldview feels incredibly alien to me.
It's difficult for me to state any point where I think they make clear errors.
Rather, it seems I just have entirely different priors than the authors.
What they take for granted, I find completely unintuitive.

Writing in length about where our priors seem to differ, would more or less be a rehash of prior debates on EA and systemic change.

I would love to have the authors of this come on an EA podcast, and hear their views expressed in more detail. Usually when I think something is clearly wrong I can explain why, here I can't.

It would be a shame if I were wrong longer than necessary.

This seems like an incredibly interesting and important discussion! I don't have much time now, but I'll throw in some quick thoughts and hopefully come back later.

I think that there is room for Romy and Paolo's viewpoint in the EA movement. Lemme see if I can translate some of their points into EA-speak and fill in some of their implicit arguments. I'll inevitably use a somewhat persuasive tone, but disagreement is of course welcome.

(For context, I've been involved in EA for about six years now, but I've never come across any EAs in the wild. Instead, I'm immersed in three communities: Buddhist, Christian, and social-justice-oriented academic. I'm deeply committed to consequentialism, but I believe that virtues are great tools for bringing about good consequences.)

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I think the main difference between Guerrilla's perspective and the dominant EA perspective is that Guerrilla believes that small actions, virtues, intuitions, etc. really matter. I'm inclined to agree.

Social justice intuition says that the fundamental problem behind all this suffering is that powerful/privileged people are jerks in various ways. For example, colonialism screwed up Africa's thriving (by the standards of that time) economy. (I'm no expert, but as far as I know, it seems highly likely that African communities would have modernized into flourishing places if they weren't exploited.) As another example, privileged people act like jerks when they spend money on luxuries instead of donating.

Spiritual intuition, from Buddhism, Christianity, and probably many other traditions, says that the reason powerful/privileged people are jerks is that they're held captive by greed, anger, delusion, and other afflictive emotions. For example, it's delusional and greedy to think that you need a sports car more than other people need basic necessities.

If afflictive emotions are the root cause of all the world's ills, then I think it's plausible to look to virtues as a solution. (I interpret "generating the political will" to mean "generating the desire for specific actions and the dedication to follow through", which sound like virtues to me.) In particular, religions and social justice philosophers seem to agree that it's important to cultivate a genuine yearning for the flourishing of all sentient beings. Other virtues--equanimity, generosity, diligence--obviously help with altruistic endeavors. Virtues can support the goal of happiness for all in at least three ways. First, a virtuous person can help others more effectively. Compassion and generosity help them to gladly share their resources, patience helps them to avoid blowing up with anger and damaging relationships, and perseverance helps them to keep working through challenges. Second, people who have trained their minds are themselves happier with their circumstances (citation needed). Great, now there's less work for others to do! Third, according to the Buddhist tradition, a virtuous person knows better what to do at any given moment. By developing compassion, one develops wisdom, and vice versa. The "Effective" and the "Altruism" are tied together. This makes sense because spiritual training should make one more open, less reactive, and less susceptible to subconscious habits; once these obscurations are removed, one has a clearer view of what needs to be done in any given moment. You don't want to act on repressed fear, anger, or bigotry by accident! To riff off Romy and Paolo's example of "wealthy EA donors" failing to work on themselves, their ignorance of their own minds may have real-world consequences when they don't even notice that they could support systemic change at their own organizations. The argument here is that our mental states have significant effects on our actions, so we'd better help others by cleaning up our harmful mental tendencies.

Maybe this internal work won't bear super-effective fruit immediately, but I think it's clear that mind-training and wellbeing create a positive feedback loop. Investing now will pay off later: building compassionate and wise communities would be incredibly beneficial long-term.

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Miscellaneous points in no particular order:

"EA seems to unquestioningly replicate the values of the old system: efficiency and cost-effectiveness, growth/scale, linearity, science and objectivity, individualism, and decision-making by experts/elites".

Here's how I interpret the argument: historically, people who value these things have gone on to gain a bunch of power and use it to oppress others. This is evidence that valuing these things leads to bad consequences. Therefore, we should try to find values that have better track records. I'd be fascinated to see a full argument for or against this chain of reasoning.

More factors that may or may not matter: Greed might be the root cause of someone's aspiration toward efficiency+growth. A lack of trust+empathy might lead someone to embrace individualism. Giving power to experts/elites suggests a lack of respect for non-elites.

"In short, we believe that EA could do more to encourage wealth owners to dig deep to transform themselves to build meaningful relationships and political allyship that are needed for change at the systems level."

If you assume that spreading virtues is crucial, as I've argued above, and if virtues can spread throughout networks of allies, then you should build those networks.

We would suspect that donors and grant managers with a deep emotional connection to their work and an actual interest to have their personal lives, values and relationships be touched by it will stick with it and go the extra mile to make a positive contribution, generating even more positive outcomes and impact.

We need mind training so that we can help impartially. Impartiality is compatible with cultivating "warm" qualities like trust and relationships. Julia Wise explains why no one is a statistic: http://www.givinggladly.com/2018/10/no-one-is-statistic.html

More philanthropic funding, about half of it we would argue, should go to initiatives that are still small, unproven and/or academically ‘unprovable’, that tackle the system rather than the symptoms, and adopt a grassroots, participatory bottom-up approach to finding alternative solutions, which might bear more plentiful fruit in the long run."

Sounds like a good consequentialist thesis that fits right in in EA!

Following the publication of our article about where we believe EA adds to the philanthropic landscape and where it fails to encourage a deeper, much-needed reflection, we have been excited to receive a high level of engagement. In particular, we appreciated the reactions by members of the EA community, and the many thoughtful responses on the EA Forum. We applaud many of such post’s focus on a constant quest to find solutions to the world’s problems, rather than to be 100% right. We also don’t aim to definitively solve the debate or to argue for one side vs another, as we really view this as a joint effort rather than two mutually exclusive schools of thought. We also think the activism world can learn from this type of engagement and debate. Therefore, we have collated some further clarifications to our positions, and some responses to the most common objections raised since our article’s publication.

Overall, our principal aim for the article has been to discourage a narrow and often short-termistic interpretation of the EA principles that result at worst in dogmatism and sometimes in what we consider to be blind spots, such as the three we’d like to cover more in depth below:

1. Basing cause area and intervention selection purely on a narrow and technocratic (Western) scientific analysis without any anchoring in the local lived experiences of people, or 
2. Not having wealth owners question the origins of their wealth and the negative impact of their investments and/or entrepreneurial activity, or
3. Dedicating grant capital to technical solutions that can often be supported by (impact) investment instead of philanthropy, and that, being technical solutions, might be very effective at treating the symptoms but not at changing the fundamental root causes.
    

We are not against science and objectivity, but we operate on an expanded notion of what many EAs consider to be valid ‘evidence’.

Between the two of us, we have two Masters’ degrees and a PhD, and have therefore taken our fair share of statistics and econometrics classes and spent many months running regressions. Therefore, on a personal level, we ‘get’ science and appreciate all the available methodologies to investigate probability, expected outcomes, and, ideally, causality. Because of this knowledge, we are also very aware of the limitations of empirical methods and linear cause-effect thinking.

Institutionally, at Guerrilla, we aren't afraid of data where it's useful. We support geeks like the Autonomy team who use data to highlight glaring social injustices (like the class and gender differences when it comes to the risk of being exposed to COVID-19 at work). We appreciate grantees who can articulate the evidence backing their theories of change, and we dig deep into those before making any grant. For many other activist groups, we assist them in reflecting about their approach and articulating their theory of change, fully knowing that there are many class and educational barriers to provide us with information in English and in a way that we deem to be ‘right’. 

We also stay on top of the most recent debates about what is considered effective in working towards environmental and social justice. Because, let's be clear, the fight for justice is a complex multi-actor process as Romy also highlights in her PhD research on translocal anti-mining movements. Theories of change are subject to debate and change (see e.g. this critique of Extinction Rebellion's theory of change and the social science behind it) and we try our best to stay on top of these debates and keep an open mind for counter-intuitive, new, and creative ideas. Because, as Felix Oldenburg put it beautifully in this talk (starting at minute 10): it takes a lot of 'ineffective altruists' who are bold enough to experiment and move the knowledge of the field for all of us, before some effective altruist can come along to fund the one thing that - for now - seems to work according to their framework of analysis of expected outcomes.

As we argue in our article, EA seems to privilege 'hard' data, forgetting about the warm data that makes up a big part of our experience. In one sense, therefore, we very much operate like EAs, trying to figure out the expected positive outcome of our philanthropic Euros. How we go about doing so, however, is different. Currently, we are trying to figure out how to include the quality of relationships created into an evaluation of our grantmaking. In a recent conversation with our grantees, our contribution to the field of European activism via 'magical matchmaking' was pointed out by activists and helped us to expand our thinking about the impact we might have. Implicit in this is another element that we'd like to see added to the EA approach: participation. Who decides the criteria and data that form the base of any impact assessment? Whose opinion counts when it comes to creating a different world? Are we not recreating extractive relationships and promoting dominant Western paradigms that have so far proven destructive when we as funders dictate what the problem is, what the impact should be and how it should be measured?   

For example, Genova Che Osa, an Italian group fighting for - amongst others - the right for young people to receive a statutory ‘inheritance’ to pay for their studies and apprenticeships, combines both university research in traditional social sciences to determine the merits of policy alternatives, as well as grounding their cause area prioritization in what they hear from the grassroots and the people directly affected by the systemic issues afflicting Italian youth, such as a lack of meritocracy, ageism, rising income inequality, etc. The voice and participation of beneficiaries is also key to crafting optimal interventions to achieve the change identified in the most effective way. And without a broad-based engagement of citizens and the participation of young people who live in the city, how would Genoa Che Osa ever develop policy proposals that can be truly transformational in content and in process? 

What we have a problem with is the belief that the technical solutions identified through accepted, Westernized scientific methodologies are the only or main solutions to the root causes of our ecological, socioeconomic, spiritual, and democratic crises. We fully acknowledge that many EAs accept ‘cluelessness’ and model it in their decision-making accordingly, but many other EAs we’ve come across don’t, and reject social justice philanthropy on the basis that the proof that it works cannot be described in ‘scientific’ terms amenable to them.

Instead, as we highlight in the article, but could have probably articulated better, we call for the development and inclusion of more forms of data that can best capture the potential for systems change. 

This is especially important when solutionism cannot simply be the answer; for example: if we want to end the profit-obsessed capitalism and the culture of expansion-at-all-costs that are among the root causes of factory farming, we believe philanthropic euros should be dedicated to tackling the adaptive challenge of how can we as a society make it unacceptable to consume such vast quantities of meat, beyond our health and planetary boundaries and to re-connect people to the system of food production. To move society in this direction, we need to expand the notion of what we consider to be ‘science’ to include qualitative, grassroots perspectives, political insights, and warm data about systems dynamics that cannot be reduced to what is available as a finding to be found in a Western academic journal or run through a RCT. This could include what one of the commentators in the EA forum terms “moral circle expansion” and “corporate campaigns”, not just by changing political processes and coordination mechanisms. In no way we meant to indicate that there is one single root cause for the world’s ills, or that we know what such root cause is, let alone how to definitively tackle it. However, capitalism of the irresponsible kind, the one that does not account for the negative externalities of how things and money are made, combined with patriarchy, a culture of growth at all costs, and other forms of social ills such as racism and speciesism we believe all contribute as joint root causes. We believe we should look at such root causes and assess interventions targeted at them in the same way EAs assess interventions aimed at technical solutions.

And lastly, to make our wish more concrete, we would like to say that we would absolutely love, for example as part of our “backbone” grants, to sponsor an organization helping activists incorporate more non-traditional data-points to inform an optimal strategy to generate long-lasting change. So we agree with one of the EA forum commentators that our challenge, which we take fully onboard, will continue to be to be able to justify our belief that grassroots work to change the political and economic systems is important/tractable/neglected to the extent that it should be at least as prioritized as many interventions that get funded through EA-affiliated organizations.

We need to better clarify what exactly we want financial wealth holders to do.

Essentially, it’s about cleaning up one’s closet before going out and espousing any philanthropic endeavour, including EA-style grants. One could view EA grant-making akin to a very complex medical treatment for a complex disease for which little is known. Surely the doctor would recommend that one start by not drinking, not smoking, exercising, meditating, getting good sleep, etc. before embarking on such a rigorous therapy. This is exactly what we recommend wealth owners to do: while the technical cure can be outsourced to “experts” to a certain extent, there is a whole deal of personal work that cannot be outsourced: no one can do your physical exercising for you ultimately. As one of the commentators on the EA forum mentions: “Our mental states have significant effects on our actions, so we'd better help others by cleaning up our harmful mental tendencies”. Therefore, along the same lines, we would recommend that financial wealth holders join groups like Resource Generation (US) and Resource Justice (UK), and first and foremost digest and internalize and own up to their privilege. 

Secondly, we would want them to more precisely calculate the negative externalities caused by their wealth accumulation and engage in direct reparations where possible, or at least commit to contribute a significant amount to prevent further harm in the specific sector where wealth was generated. Thirdly, with the remaining wealth, we want wealth holders to make sure that they are at the very least not perpetuating harm by participating into a financial system that directly abets social and environmental destruction. Ideally, therefore, all investable wealth should be invested in a way that causes no harm, benefits stakeholders, and - as far as possible - directly contributes to solutions by generating positive impact through investments in technical solutions such as clean meat, safe AI, accessible medtech, cleantech, etc. And lastly, then and only then, after a careful consideration of what is most efficient in terms of maximizing lifetime impact, gradually and intentionally spend down their wealth and adopt an approach which is consistent with consequentialism and the EA principles. We of course would argue that such an approach would include both grants that are already mainstream in the EA community, such as donating to GiveDirectly (which we like because of the self-determination of beneficiaries), and radical social justice grants of the kind Guerrilla makes, to help prevent the people who receive via GiveDirectly to become that poor and oppressed in the first place.

To clarify: what we are not advocating for is for wealth holders to spend too much time on the ethical and deontological issues arising from holding wealth as a justification to hoard it further, but to operate from a position of deep humility and acknowledgment of the externalities that might have been produced in such wealth accumulation and to repair them, suspending narrow consequentialism a little bit for the sake of a just transition, and then and only then adopt a more consequentialist, impact-maximising mindset. We also believe that such mindset needs to be grounded in a long-term, systems perspective, where both maximizing positive outcomes for others/the environment and ensuring that we build a system that prevents such disproportionate wealth accumulation with accompanying negative externalities in the first place, are equally valued as priorities for grant-making. If we only focus on the former, we might continue to bite our tail and keep producing the ills we’re trying to solve with philanthropy. So in conclusion we absolutely agree that it’s important for wealth holders to do the most good, but in order to be in the best position to do so, they should fix themselves and the systems they can affect first given where they’re coming from, rather than forgetting about the past altogether.

Philanthropy vs (impact) investments: finding the right mix that maximizes good

A corollary of the factory farming example above is that we are using philanthropic dollars to tackle the complex, adaptive challenge of aiming directly at root causes because we believe investment can instead be used to develop technical solutions to known problems at scale. Guerrilla was founded and is independently funded by high financial net worth individuals, Paolo included, who desire to maximize the impact of their monetary resources. They therefore recognize that it would not be efficient to spend precious philanthropic money on solutions such as the development of plant- or cellular-based meat when in fact these are tremendous opportunities to both create positive impact and recycle capital for future philanthropic use. 

Sadly, our experience with many EA practitioners is that some still fail at grasping the efficient frontier of impact and returns, according to which it is best not to give all philanthropic giving at once, because similar impact could be produced via ‘returnable’ forms of capital such as repayable grants, loans, or investments, and also because of the potential missed opportunity of donating in the future.

Take climate change as an issue for instance: in Paolo’s portfolio, he tackles it by following Project Drawdown’s scientific approach of simultaneously reducing sources of carbon emissions, supporting carbon sinks, and improving society. How? For example, he makes sure all his publicly listed stocks and bonds are free of fossil fuels and intensive animal and agricultural farming. He hires fund managers to proactively engage with harmful companies such as oil producers, to get them to change their business model towards renewables. He invests directly in sustainable forestry and regenerative agriculture practices via private equity and real asset investments, measuring the extent of the carbon sequestered in the soil. So far, most of these investments are in technical solutions provided by companies. But it would not make sense to only do this, and especially to sponsor such technical solutions, which can be achieved in a profit-seeking way, with grant capital. Therefore, he donates to Guerrilla Foundation and other social justice activists and organizations to directly affect change in the political, social, and economic structures that allow for climate change and other social and environmental issues to continue unabated. 

We hope that this example serves to illustrate our point that we believe Effective Altruism should develop, as a movement (some within  the EA movement are already working on this and we applaud them for it), more rigour in terms of articulating what interventions necessitate investment vs. philanthropic capital.