Preliminary note: for most readers of this forum, this post will be preaching to the choir. However, I decided to write it for two reasons:
- To create common knowledge in EA around the concept I will discuss. (This excellent post from Scott Aaronson provided some motivation.)
- I have noticed a recent stream of forum posts and movement-growth efforts that do not seem to take the concept I will discuss into account.
On prioritization
While it is the case that anyone can contribute to the EA movement, it is also important to remember that one of EA's most important concepts is prioritization: it is possible to save and improve many more lives if you prioritize where you direct your money and efforts.
There is a skewed distribution of the effectiveness of interventions, such that by prioritizing the most effective interventions, you can have many many times the impact. Given limited resources, if you care about massively improving the world, you should focus most of your attention on that small percentage of highly effective interventions. GiveWell only promotes a small percentage of charities based on this principle.
If the distribution of the effectiveness of people is similarly skewed, then EA should take seriously the idea of prioritizing outreach for primarily the most effective people. Is this distribution similarly skewed?
Yes. We live in a world where there is a skewed distribution for the amounts of good various people can do with their resources. The richest person in America, Bill Gates, has roughly $79,000,000,000 in assets. The median net worth of an American is $44,900. You would need to recruit over 1,000,000 Americans to match what your impact could potentially be by recruiting Bill Gates. If your goal is to have as much money as possible be donated in the best ways possible, then you should seriously consider whether the expected value of recruiting Bill Gates or other billionaires is higher than the expected value of recruiting as many people as possible. For example, it is likely that GiveWell's recruitment of Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz was higher impact than all other EA donor-recruitment efforts combined.
Likewise, the difference in influence ability between Hilary Clinton and the average American is likely to be at least an order of magnitude difference. Similarly the difference in productive output between an Elon Musk and the average American is likely to be at least an order of magnitude difference.
In a world where everyone's ability to save and improve lives is equal, you might prefer mass-movement strategies and not worry much about who your outreach is directed toward. If, however, we live in a world in which there is a skewed distribution (likely even a power law distribution) of wealth, talent, and influence, you might prioritize strategies which try to recruit people for whom there is evidence of outsized effectiveness. We live in the latter world.
On the implications of prioritization
This can be a difficult conclusion for an effective altruist to come to. Our lives are based on compassion for others. So to prioritize some people over others based on their effectiveness can be an emotionally difficult idea. However, it is worth noting that every self-identifying EA already engages in this behavior. Behind every intervention or charity that we choose to deprioritize in favor of others which do more good, there are people. Similarly, behind every EA organization are decisions to hire the most effective people. In doing so, EA organizations are also choosing to prioritize certain people over others. Many or most of these people - for both cases above - have praiseworthy intentions and identities strongly associated with doing lots of good. Does deprioritizing certain people make EA inhumane?
Clearly, the answer is no! An EA chooses to prioritize for the most humane reasons possible, almost by definition.
So far I have described a fact about the world (the skewed distribution of personal effectiveness) and the consequences for an EA (prioritizing recruitment of the most effective people). What are more specific implications?
- Organizations like Giving What We Can, The Life You Can Save, and the Centre for Effective Altruism might focus less on the amount of people recruited and more on the effectiveness of people recruited. For instance, recruiting one Mark Zuckerberg could move more money than the cumulative money moved from all GWWC and TLYCS pledges to date. Likewise, 100 hours spent recruiting one Angela Merkel would likely be higher impact than 100 hours spent recruiting 100 of the usual types of people who are attracted to EA. (I deliberately chose examples that I believe which could be within the EA movement's grasp given the current set of connections that I am aware of.)
- Welcomingness should continue to be promoted, but not at the cost of lowering community standards. For instance, you would really not want to learn that your nation's medical schools promote low barriers to entry at all costs. If they prioritized welcomingness over effectiveness when you or someone you know is on the operating table, you would probably be upset. You would also not want the system for generating qualified scientists and engineers to drop their many-tiered filters - unless you want bridges buildings to fall. In our case, the stakes for finding well-qualified people are much, much higher. (It's important to note here, however, that welcomingness is a very different concept than diversity. EA will need highly effective people from many different types of backgrounds to tackle problems of extreme complexity. Strategies to increase the diversity of qualified candidates will help satisfy this need; strategies which lower effectiveness in favor of welcomingness will not necessarily help this need, and will occasionally harm it.)
- Researchers in the EA community might investigate evidence from psychology, from the business literature, and from interviewing top hiring managers and recruiters on which attributes predict effectiveness. After this evidence is synthesized, EA movement-builders might try to figure out most cost-effective ways to find people with these attributes.
- Chapters and movement-builders might prefer one-on-one outreach and niche marketing to mass-marketing strategies.
- If it is possible for current EAs to dramatically self-improve, then they should figure out how to do so. While there may be some genetic component to personal effectiveness, there is growing evidence that personal ability may be much less fixed than previously assumed. (Indeed, to some extent this seems to be the hypothesis that CFAR is testing. (And possibly Leverage as well?))
[Important note: much of this content is not original - is has been based on a series of conversations with several members of the EA movement who have asked to stay anonymous. Parts of this have even been copy-and-pasted from those conversations with permission.]
Thanks for the post! I mostly agree with your key points: some people are (unfortunately) a lot more powerful than others, and this seems like a reason to focus on recruiting them. I also agree that, for this reason and others, it's not obvious that EA should try to be a mass movement.
However, I think that you're missing some benefits of having a more diverse, non-elite movement, and so reaching a conclusion which is too strong. In short, my argument is that the accusation of elitism, and elitism itself can BE hurtful to EA, not just FEEL hurtful. I'll focus on three arguments about the consequences of elitism, then make a couple of other points.
First, I think that appearing like an 'elite' movement has ambiguous effects on how EA is presented in the media. Whilst it might increase how prestigious EA is, and so make it more attractive, it is also something that I could imagine negative articles about (in fact, I think that there may already be such articles, but I can't place them right now). Something along the lines of 'Look at these rich, white, Ivy-league educated men. What do they know about poverty? Why should we listen to them?'. I'm not saying that these arguments are necessarily particularly good ones, just that they could be damaging to EA's image, which might limit our ability to get more people involved, and retain people.
Second, we sadly currently live in a world where power (in the forms of wealth and political capital that you discussed) correlates with a lot of other characteristics - being white, being male, being cis, being straight, having privileged parents, etc. EA probably over-represents those characteristics already, and this can cause a variety of problems. Less privileged people might feel excluded from the community, which is not nice for them. It may also reduce their participation, and so EA may exclude perspectives or skillsets that are more common in underprivileged groups, and make worse decisions as a result.
Third, it is possible that diversity is correlated with avoiding movement collapse (I'm not sure of this though - perhaps others have done more research). I've hinted above at some ways in which this could be brought about: causing negative media attention, and causing individuals to feel excluded, and leave the movement. This might be a really important consideration.
So far I've been talking only about the consequences of making EA more elite, but I think it's important not to dismiss non-consequentialist considerations. It may be that it is just good to promote diversity and fairness whenever you have the chance. There may also be non-consequence based moral reasons to include less powerful people in important decisions that could affect them. (Again, I'm not committing to this position, but it seems worth considering seriously, if we admit some uncertainty about whether utilitarianism is the right moral theory.)
I think that given these considerations, it's no longer so obvious that EA should be an elite movement. You point out some good reasons that EA should be elite, but there are reasons pointing in the other direction.
But as you point out, the question is not 'Should EA be elite?', but 'Should EA try to be more or less elite, given where we are at the moment?'. Where are we? EA already seems to be a pretty elite movement: I mentioned the lack of diversity above, and I think we probably have an abnormally high number of billionaires engaged with EA.
So when we account for how elite EA already is, and the risks of being elite, it seems quite possible that EA should be trying to be less elite.
Edit: see http://www.effective-altruism.com/ea/sl/celebrating_all_who_are_in_effective_altruism/ and the comments for even more reasons why this is a tricky question!
For an example of a media piece about the problems of EA elitism, see here: http://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_elitist_philanthropy_of_so_called_effective_altruism