Summary: most effective interventions to do good are still roughly as high impact as they were a few years ago. Unfortunately, some people in the EA community don’t feel as happy about the amount of good they can do as they did in the past. This is true even when the amount of good they are doing or can expect to do hasn’t decreased. While I think there are other sources of unhappiness with doing good, I am going to discuss adaptation to an increased expectation of the amount of good we can do as a major contributor to this problem.
The original prompt to do good from the EA community was: did you know that with just giving 10% of your income you can save a life or even multiple per year? But long-termism and the astronomical waste argument have shifted the community towards expecting to personally be able to accomplish a much larger amount of good. Anything less feels insufficient to many. The community and the individuals within have adapted to this higher expectation. For the majority of people, this expectation to do an existential amount of good does not materialise, and so they feel disappointed.
But that’s silly. As a first example, we can still save lives with only a small fraction of our income. Saving lives has not become any less tremendously important. Over 200,000 children under 5 still die of malaria each year. I am concerned that as people have become disappointed with not living up to their hopes of possibly saving billions of lives or fundamentally shaping the far future, they become disappointed with their ability to do good in general and give up. Nobody should give up for this reason. You can still do an amazing amount of good by saving lives.
The same is true for other ways to do good. Factory farming is as big an issue as it was a few years ago, with dozens of billions of animals living in factory farms under dreadful conditions. Becoming vegetarian still saves over a dozen land animals in expectancy per year from suffering and death. The same is true in areas outside of EA’s traditional causes. If you have been a regular blood donor or working on solar panels, your efforts produce roughly as much value as they did in the past. Having learnt tools from the EA community to quantify these efforts doesn’t change the bottom line of actual impact, it just helps prioritising between options.
This equally applies to work on long-termist problems. People working on AI Safety or biorisk might have had the hope to make critical contributions that might fundamentally shape the future, but reality shows these problems to be very hard. Most people working on them will only make a small contribution towards solving them and that can feel disappointing. But many of these small marginal contributions are necessary.
Remember that the argument for long-termism is that people might be able to have more impact by focussing on global catastrophic risks or by shaping the long term future in some other way. Whether you agree with this premise or not, the argument for long-termism is not that you will have less impact in total by saving lives or other interventions now than previously assumed. This means that fighting factory farming and other do gooding efforts are as good and important as they ever were.
In some sense, this is obviously true. Yet I do not have the impression that this feels true to people. If saving lives and other do gooding efforts now feel less good to you than they did when you first heard about EA, that probably means you have adapted to expecting to do a lot more good now. That’s terrible!
Participating in the EA community should make you feel more motivated about the amount of good you are able to do, not less. If it makes you feel less motivated on balance, then the EA community is doing something fundamentally wrong and everybody might be better off somewhere else until this is fixed.
If you have adapted to the belief that you can personally prevent lots of astronomical waste, it is time to go back to having more realistic expectations.
I am not sure how to revert this adaptation on a community wide level. I hope that reminding people of opportunities like most of us being able to save dozens of lives in our lifetime is a good start.
On an individual level, you can also try the ordinary weapons against adaptation like keeping a gratitude journal.
Think about all the ways you can have an amazing impact that are actually available to you personally. There are quite a lot. Saving lives via donations still trumps many other opportunities in terms of impact, but there are yet more ways of doing good worth considering, some of which are harder to quantify. Most ‘direct work’ options fall in this category - working on important problems in government, academia or the non-profit sector. You can also do the more effective forms of volunteering.
It is not clear to me to what extent the rise of long-termism in the EA community is why people insufficiently appreciate the high impact they are already able to have, whether that is via donating or working directly on important or less important problems. I’m not sure the answer matters. Maybe there are other people who are able to have an even higher impact than you. But that doesn’t change the amount of good you can do.
Don’t forget to still aim for as much good as you can. This post is reminding you to do the most good you can personally do and telling you about ways to feel better about this particular amount, not telling you to aim for anything less.
Try to have realistic expectations about how much good you can do and get satisfaction from that. There are lots of important problems left. There are as big and as important as they ever were, and the world needs your contributions just as much as before.
Thanks to AGB for helpful suggestions for this post.
I disagree with the common framing that saving lives and so on constitute one straightforward, unambiguous way to do good, and that longtermism just constitutes or motivates some interventions with the potential to do even more good.
It seems to me (and I'm not alone, of course) that concern for the long term renders the sign of the value most of the classic EA interventions ambiguous. In any event, it renders the magnitude of their value more ambiguous than it is if one disregards flow-through effects of all kinds. If
then I think it's reasonable for her to feel less happy about how much good she can do as she becomes more concerned about the long term.
For the record, I don't know how common this feeling is, or how often people feel more excited about their ability to save lives and so on than they did a few years ago. One could certainly think that saving lives, say, has even more long-term net positive effects than short-term positive effects. I just want to say that when someone says that they feel less excited about how much good they can do, and that longtermism has something to do with that, that could be justified. They might just be realizing that doing good isn't and never was as good as they thought it was.
Yep, I agree that if i) you personally buy into the long-termist thesis, and ii) you expect the long-term effects of ordinary do gooding actions to be bigger than short-term effects, and iii) you expect these long-term effects to be negative, then it makes sense to be less enthusiastic about your ability to do good than before.
However, I doubt most people who feel like I described in the post fall into this category. As you said, you were uncertain about how common this feeling is. Lots of people hear about the much bigger impact you can have by focussing on the far future. Significantly fewer are well versed in the specific details and practical implications of long-termism.
While I have heard about people believing ii) and iii), I haven't seen either argument carefully written up anywhere. I'd assume this is true for lots of people. There has been a big push in the EA community to believe i), this has not been true for ii) and iii) as far as I can tell.
If I'm not misunderstanding you, being less enthusiastic than before just requires (i) (if by "the long-termist thesis" we mean the moral claim that we should care about the long term) and (iii). I don't think that's a lot of requirements. Plus, this is all in a framework of precise expectations; you could also just think that the long-term effects are ambiguous enough to render the expected value undefined, and endorse a decision theory which penalizes this sort of ambiguity.
My guess is that when people start thinking about longtermism and get less excited about ordinary do-gooding, this is often at least in part due either to a belief in (iii) or, more commonly, to the realization of the ambiguity, even when this isn't articulated in detail. That seems likely to me (a) because, anecdotally, it seems relatively common for people raise concerns along these lines independently after thinking about this stuff for a while and (b) because there has been some push to believe in this ambiguity, namely all the writing on cluelessness. But of course that's just a guess.
In principle you only need i) and iii), that's true, but I think in practice ii) is usually also required. Humans are fairly scope insensitive, and I doubt we'd see low community morale from ordinary do gooding actions being less good by a factor of two or three. As an example, historically GiveWell estimates of how much saving a life with AMF costs have differed by about this much - and it didn't seem to have much of an impact on community morale. Not so now.
Our crux seems to be that you assume cluelessness or ideas in the same space are a large factor in producing low community morale for doing good. I must admit that I was surprised by this response, I personally haven't found these arguments to be particularly persuasive, and most people around me seem to feel similarly about such arguments, if they are familiar with them at all.
I don't know if there is lower community morale of the sort you describe--you're better positioned to have a sense of that than I am--but to the extent that there is, yes, it seems we disagree about whether to suspect that cluelessness would be a significant factor.
It would be interesting to include a pair of questions on the next EA survey about whether people feel more or less charitably motivated than last year, and, if less, why.
Have you written somewhere about why you don't find cluelessness arguments to be particularly persuasive?
No, I haven't. Given the amount of upvotes Phil's comment received (from which I conclude a decent fraction of people do find arguments in this space demotivating which is important to know) I will probably read up on it again. But I very rarely write top-level posts and the probability of this investigation turning into one is negligible.
Got it.
Perhaps a few bullet points in a comment if there's no space for a top-level post (better written quickly than not at all...)
Hi Milan,
This was now quite a while ago but I have spent some time trying to figure out why I don't find cluelessness arguments persuasive. After we spent a bunch of time deconfusing ourselves, Alex has written up almost everything I could say on the subject in a long comment chain here.
Thanks... I replied on that thread.
Through thinking about these comments, I did remember an EA Forum thread in which ii) and iii) were argued about from 4 years ago: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ajPY6zxSFr3BbMsb5/are-givewell-top-charities-too-speculative
It's worth reading the comment section in full. Turns out my position has been consistent for the past 4 years (though I should have remembered that thread!).
Agreed - would love to see this written up by someone.
I expanded on this here: What consequences?