One of the most distinctive features of effective altruism is the use of the importance, tractability, and neglectedness framework for evaluating charities.
It's true that the ITN framework is more appropriate for individual actions that have easily measurable marginal contributions to human welfare, rather than hard-to-measure individual contributions to a collective effort to gain a good outcome. It is, however, unclear how much this cleave reality at its joints between EAs and leftists and social justice activists:
- Longtermist EAs have every reason to not use the ITN framework by that metric: either the decades of research and movement-building lead to the creation of an aligned AGI singleton, or it doesn't.
- On the flip side, it's not clear to me why we could not consider the marginal benefit of shutting down a weapons factory (or oil pipeline, or factory farm, or gain-of-function biotech lab, or AI capabilities datacenter) from an ITN perspective (indeed, effective animal *activists* do exactly this), nor is it immediately obvious to me that it wouldn't be competitive with the top GiveWell charities in term of preventing deaths in the global South, especially considering activism is relatively cheap.
As an addendum, I would like to note that there are activist venues which do not compete with EA causes for either money, or even labor. For example, if you are in a position in a company that would be of interest to the military-industrial complex, like, I don't know, *a big tech company in Silicon Valley*, there are going to be plenty occasions to do fight to prevent deaths in the global South and still donate 10% of your paycheck to the Against Malaria Foundation afterwards.
Agree with most of this, but I have to ask, do animal activists that rescue or let animals loose from farms really do that? From what I've seen, they'll say things like "it's a drop in the ocean but I felt it was my duty" or "at least 300 animals are now free, and maybe more people will start doing this because of us".
People blowing up pipelines seem not to consider effectiveness in a cold, mathematical way either. From what I've seen from both Unabomber fans and more regular hardcore environmentalists, they're mostly the same "maybe one day millions of people will start blowing up pipelines and we'll be a real threat to the establishment, also it's just My Duty to protect this forest".
I mean the Unabomber literally was a mathematician. We don't we have surveys of pipeline vandals so who knows. I doubt anyone here will counter you by saying that they did blow up a pipeline for "analytical" reasons because that would be, you know, publicly admitting to a crime. But at least the book on how to blow up a pipeline ("How to blow up a pipeline") shows a very methodical/analytical reasoning process.
It's true that the ITN framework is more appropriate for individual actions that have easily measurable marginal contributions to human welfare, rather than hard-to-measure individual contributions to a collective effort to gain a good outcome. It is, however, unclear how much this cleave reality at its joints between EAs and leftists and social justice activists:
- Longtermist EAs have every reason to not use the ITN framework by that metric: either the decades of research and movement-building lead to the creation of an aligned AGI singleton, or it doesn't.
- On the flip side, it's not clear to me why we could not consider the marginal benefit of shutting down a weapons factory (or oil pipeline, or factory farm, or gain-of-function biotech lab, or AI capabilities datacenter) from an ITN perspective (indeed, effective animal *activists* do exactly this), nor is it immediately obvious to me that it wouldn't be competitive with the top GiveWell charities in term of preventing deaths in the global South, especially considering activism is relatively cheap.
As an addendum, I would like to note that there are activist venues which do not compete with EA causes for either money, or even labor. For example, if you are in a position in a company that would be of interest to the military-industrial complex, like, I don't know, *a big tech company in Silicon Valley*, there are going to be plenty occasions to do fight to prevent deaths in the global South and still donate 10% of your paycheck to the Against Malaria Foundation afterwards.
Agree with most of this, but I have to ask, do animal activists that rescue or let animals loose from farms really do that? From what I've seen, they'll say things like "it's a drop in the ocean but I felt it was my duty" or "at least 300 animals are now free, and maybe more people will start doing this because of us".
People blowing up pipelines seem not to consider effectiveness in a cold, mathematical way either. From what I've seen from both Unabomber fans and more regular hardcore environmentalists, they're mostly the same "maybe one day millions of people will start blowing up pipelines and we'll be a real threat to the establishment, also it's just My Duty to protect this forest".
Have I missed something?
I mean the Unabomber literally was a mathematician. We don't we have surveys of pipeline vandals so who knows. I doubt anyone here will counter you by saying that they did blow up a pipeline for "analytical" reasons because that would be, you know, publicly admitting to a crime. But at least the book on how to blow up a pipeline ("How to blow up a pipeline") shows a very methodical/analytical reasoning process.
There's a section on efficiency in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJBG5uhIqrk
(But, like, increasing the marginal cost of activities with negative externalities is precisely what is advised by even pure neoclassical economics.)