If you set out to maximise the welfare of people alive today, treating them all equally, you’ll end up doing some pretty weird things. Who’d have thought “doing the most good” boiled down to handing out cash to poor Kenyan farmers?
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.
It looks like they’ve made the mistakes of ignoring small probabilities of big upsides, focusing only on concrete outcomes, and ignored the historical record (in which science, technology and better government are some of the main drivers of progress). It also looks like they’ve completely discounted common-sense do-gooding, which is not mainly focused on global health.
Now suppose you care about both the welfare of people today *and* helping people in the future. If you care about the future, you’ll want to make investments in technology and economic growth that will pay off later. You’ll also want to make sure society is in a position to navigate unpredictable future challenges. This will mean better global institutions, smarter leaders, more social science, and so on. And it’s hard to know which of these are most pressing.1
Overall, this menu of global priorities looks much closer to common-sense efforts to make a difference. In this way, long-run focused effective altruism ends up looking more common-sense than efforts just focused on helping present generations.2
Long-run focused effective altruism is often seen as even less common-sense than the short-run focused version. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Long-run focused effective altruism only becomes unintuitive when taken to an extreme and combined with further non-common-sense beliefs, such as the belief that reducing existential risk is the best way to aid the future, and within that, the belief that artificial intelligence is the most pressing existential risk.3
Because long-run focused effective altruism is associated with these further weird positions, it’s often downplayed when speaking to new people, in favor of short-run effective altruism (malaria nets and so on). I propose that it will be better, especially for people who are already engaged with making a difference, to introduce them first to *moderate long-run focused effective altruism* rather than the short-run focused version. It’s more intuitive and reasonable sounding.
The reason this doesn’t happen already, I think, is that people aren’t sure how to explain moderate long-run focused effective altruism - it’s much easier to say “malaria nets” and direct someone to (traditional) GiveWell. But in the last year it has become much easier to explain. When it comes to picking causes, emphasise that effective altruists take a strategic approach. Yes, they consider their personal passions, but they also try to work on causes that are important, tractable and neglected. Explain that the most important causes are the ones that do the most to build a flourishing society now and in the long-run. Then give several examples: yes there’s global health (especially good on tractability), but there’s also global catastrophic risks (good on importance and neglectedness); scientific research, penal reform, and much else. Link them the Open Philanthropy Project, 80,000 Hours and the Copenhagen Consensus.
In conclusion, short-run effective altruism is often favored as more intuitive and better for introducing to new people compared to long-run focused effective altruism, because long-run focused effective altruism is often associated with further weird positions. However, a more moderate and uncertain long-run focused effective altruism is actually the most reasonable sounding position.
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1 Of course, interventions which maximise short-run welfare might *also* happen to be the best-way to help the long-run future, but that’s a topic for a different day.
2 It also looks more common-sense because it involves less certainty. It’s very hard to know what the long-run effects of our actions are, so long-run focused effective altruism tends to work with a broader range of causes than the short-run focused version.
3. In fact, even if you believe both of these things, once the low-hanging fruit with friendly AI research etc. are used up, you’re going to then focus on common-sense causes like international collaboration.
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.
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.)
My main evidence is that these things are only supported by a relatively small proportion of other groups that contain some people who care a great deal about making a difference e.g. people involved in international development, social entrepreneurs, tech entrepreneurs who care about impact, the non-profit sector, some academics, people who work at the UN, etc.
Also, it seems clear that existing altruistic communities regard a much wider range of projects as plausibly high impact, and think it's weird to focus on just one narrow area.
I think GWWC would also agree that objections along the lines of "what about the long-run or systemic effects" are some of the most common reactions to pitching AMF etc.