EA - EA’s success no one cares about by Jakub Stencel

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: EA’s success no one cares about, published by Jakub Stencel on June 24, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.StatusWhile this is part of EA Strategy Fortnight, my intention is to focus more on what effective altruism did well, rather than what it should do. At the same time, my hope would be that the post provides the community with at least some valuable context to the discussions about the path forward.This post will be very subjective and a lot less thought-through than what I am usually comfortable sharing, although built on ~13 years of experience in the field. Some details may be off, for example by memory distortion or indirect testimonies. Nevertheless, it’s truthful to my internal models – when I walk and talk to my dog about this kind of stuff, you can expect my mind to go in the same direction as this post.ContextRecently, there has been a lot of attention directed at effective altruism. Some was external, but, from my perspective, most of it came from within the movement. My interpretation was that at least a portion of it was built on feelings of anxiety, doubt, and maybe some anger or fear. Of course, a lot of concerns seemed to me legitimized by what was happening or what we were discovering.In some way, I was worried about the community I identify as part of, but at the same time, there was this feeling of appreciation that we can go together through a crisis. It’s a lesson for a young movement, and experience is invaluable. Just like it’s better to learn hard lessons about life as a teenager than an adult, of course ideally with not much harm involved.The energy spent on inward focus felt encouraging, even though I disagreed with a chunk of the opinions. After all, some of the values of effective altruism I’m the most optimistic about are openness to criticism, intellectual humility, and truth-seeking. But the more external and internal takes I was reading, the more something seemed off. Something was missing.It felt one-sided. There was almost no mention of successes and wins – some appreciation of what this very young and weird movement managed to achieve in such a short period of time. Maybe I shouldn’t expect this in adversarial pieces about EA, and maybe it was implied when people were making criticism internally, but it still didn’t feel fully right to me.It felt like we all take effective altruism for granted. There was not much gratitude in the air.Maybe one can argue that EA hasn’t done much. While I have my strong intuitions on the counterfactual impact of EA in many areas, in the end I don’t feel fully qualified here, so I would prefer to defer. Yet, I’m confident that there is at least one success we should celebrate, and it’s very much absent from the discourse – making historical progress for animals.Animal advocate’s lens on effective altruismThis is my take on the short path of effective altruism’s impact on animals. Please note that I came from the part of animal advocacy that is closely aligned with effective altruism, so I’ll be biased, and it’s good to expect that reasonable people will disagree with me in at least some parts. Additionally, Open Philanthropy, which is crucial here, is the main funder of my organization. But if bias is present in this summary, I’m very confident it’s rather due to the alignment with the core premises of effective altruism rather than a conflict of interest.FundingWhile the animal advocacy movement has never been big, it has always had very active and dedicated activists. People have always been willing to sacrifice a lot to make a difference for animals. Breaking in or getting hired at farms to document the sickening reality of animal suffering or rescue animals, being abused by police, working for years for free or minimal pay, and using any personal funds available to produce necess...