EA - Tensions between different approaches to doing good by James Özden

Link to original articleWelcome 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: Tensions between different approaches to doing good, published by James Özden on March 19, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Link-posted from my blog here.TLDR: I get the impression that EAs don't always understand where certain critics are coming from e.g. what do people actually mean when they say EAs aren't pursuing "system change" enough? or that we're focusing on the wrong things? I feel like I hear these critiques a lot, so I attempted to steelman them and put them into more EA-friendly jargon. It's almost certainly not a perfect representation of these views, nor exhaustive, but might be interesting anyway. Enjoy!I feel lucky that I have fairly diverse groups of friends. On one hand, some of my closest friends are people I know through grassroots climate and animal rights activism, from my days in Extinction Rebellion and Animal Rebellion. On the other hand, I also spend a lot of time with people who have a very different approach to improving the world, such as friends I met through the Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program or via effective altruism.Both of these somewhat vague and undefined groups, “radical” grassroots activists and empirics-focused charity folks, often critique the other group with various concerns about their methods of doing good. Almost always, I end up defending the group under attack, saying they have some reasonable points and we would do better if we could integrate the best parts of both worldviews.To highlight how these conversations usually go (and clarify my own thinking), I thought I would write up the common points into a dialogue between two versions of myself. One version, labelled Quantify Everything James (or QEJ), discusses the importance of supporting highly evidence-based and quantitatively-backed ways of doing good. This is broadly similar to what most effective altruists advocate for. The other part of myself, presented under the label Complexity-inclined James (CIJ), discusses the limitations of this empirical approach, and how else we should consider doing the most good. With this character, I’m trying to capture the objections that my activist friends often have.As it might be apparent, I’m sympathetic to both of these different approaches and I think they both provide some valuable insights. In this piece, I focus more on describing the common critiques of effective altruist-esque ways of doing good, as this seems to be something that isn’t particularly well understood (in my opinion).Without further ado:Quantify Everything James (QEJ): We should do the most good by finding charities that are very cost-effective, with a strong evidence base, and support them financially! For example, organisations like The Humane League, Clean Air Task Force and Against Malaria Foundation all seem like they provide demonstrably significant benefits on reducing animal suffering, mitigating climate change and saving human lives. For example, external evaluators estimate the Against Malaria Foundation can save a human life for around $5000 and that organisations like The Humane League affect 41 years of chicken life per dollar spent on corporate welfare campaigns.It’s crucial we support highly evidence-based organisations such as these, as most well-intentioned charities probably don’t do that much good for their beneficiaries. Additionally, the best charities are likely to be 10-100x more effective than even the average charity! Using an example from this very relevant paper by Toby Ord: If you care about helping people with blindness, one option is to pay $40,000 for someone in the United States to have access to a guide dog (the costs of training the dog & the person). However, you could also pay for surgeries to treat trachoma, a bacterial infection that is the top cause of blindness worldwide. At around $20 per ...