Agree with the spirit - there is too much herding, and I would love for Schubert's distinctions to be core concepts. However, I think the problem you describe appears in the gap between the core orgs and the community, and might be pretty hard to fix as a result.

What material implies that EA is only about ~4 things?

• the Funds
• semi-official intro talks and Fellowship syllabi
• the landing page has 3 main causes and mentions 6 more
• the revealed preferences of what people say they're working on, the distribution of object-level post tags

What emphasises cause divergence and personal fit?

• 80k have their top 7 of course, but the full list of recommended ones has 23
• Personal fit is the second thing they raise, after importance
• New causes, independent thinking, outreach, cause X, and 'question > ideology' is a major theme at every EAG and (by eye) in about a fifth of the top-voted Forum posts.

So maybe limited room for improvements to communication? Since it's already pretty clear. 

Intro material has to mention some examples, and only a couple in any depth. How should we pick examples? Impact has to come first. Could be better to not always use the same 4 examples, but instead pick the top 3 by your own lights and then draw randomly from the top 20.

Also, I've always thought of cause neutrality as conditional - "if you're able to pivot, and if you want to do the most good, what should you do?" and this is emphasised in plenty of places. (i.e. Personal fit and meeting people where they are by default.) But if people are taking it as an unconditional imperative then that needs attention.

As technicalities noted, it's easy to see the merits of these arguments in general, but harder to see who should actually do things, and what they should do.

To summarize the below:

• EA orgs already look at a wide range of causes, and the org with most of the money looks at perhaps the widest range of causes
• Our community is small and well-connected; new causes can get attention and support pretty easily if someone presents a good argument, and there's a strong historical precedent for this
• People should be welcoming and curious to people from many different backgrounds, and attempts to do more impactful work should be celebrated for many kinds of work
  • If this isn't the case now, people should be better about this

If you have suggestions for what specific orgs or funders should do, I'm interested in hearing them!

*****

To quote myself:

My comments often look like: "When you say that 'EA should do X', which people and organizations in EA are you referring to?"

Open Philanthropy does more funding and research than anyone, and they work in a broad range of areas. Maybe the concrete argument here is that they should develop more shallow investigations into medium-depth investigations?

Rethink Priorities probably does the second-most research among EA orgs, and they also look at a lot of different topics.

Founders Pledge is probably top-five among orgs, and... again, lots of variety.

Past those two organizations, most research orgs in EA have pretty specific areas of focus. Animal Charity Evaluators looks at animal charities. GiveWell looks at global health and development interventions with strong RCT support. If you point ACE at a promising new animal charity to fund, or GiveWell at a new paper showing a cool approach to improving health in the developing world, they'd probably be interested! But they're not likely to move into causes outside their focus areas, which seems reasonable.

After all of this, which organizations are left that actually have "too narrow" a focus? 80,000 Hours? The Future of Humanity Institute?

A possible argument here is that some new org should exist to look for totally new causes; on the other hand, Open Philanthropy already does a lot of this, and if they were willing to fund other people to do more of it, I assume they'd rather hire those people — and they have, in fact, been rapidly expanding their research team.

*****

On your example of cancer: Open Philanthropy gave a $6.5 million grant to cancer research in 2017, lists cancer as one of the areas they support on their "Human Health and Wellbeing" page, and notes it as a plausible focus area in a 2014 report. I'm guessing they've looked at other cancer research projects and found them somewhat less promising than their funding bar. 

Aside from Open Phil, I don't know which people or entities in EA are well-positioned to focus on cancer. It seems like someone would have to encourage existing bio-interested people to focus on cancer instead of biosecurity or neglected tropical diseases, which doesn't seem obviously good.

In the case of a cancer researcher looking for funding from an EA organization, there just aren't many people who have the necessary qualifications to judge their work, because EA is a tiny movement with a lot of young people and few experienced biologists. 

The best way for someone who isn't a very wealthy donor to change this would probably be to write a compelling case for cancer research on the Forum; lots of people read this website, including people with money to spend. Same goes for other causes someone thinks are neglected. 

This path has helped organizations like ALLFED and the Happier Lives Institute get more attention for their novel research agendas, and posts with the "less-discussed causes" tag do pretty well here.

As far as I can tell, we're bottlenecked on convincing arguments that other areas and interventions are worth funding, rather than willingness to consider or fund new areas and interventions for which convincing arguments exist.

*****

Fortunately, there's good historical precedent here: EA is roughly 12 years old, and has a track record of integrating new ideas at a rapid pace. Here's my rough timeline (I'd welcome corrections on this):

• 2007: GiveWell is founded
• 2009: Giving What We Can is founded, launching the "EA movement" (though the term "effective altruism" didn't exist yet). The initial focus was overwhelmingly on global development.
• 2011: The Open Philanthropy Project is founded (as GiveWell Labs). Initial shallow investigations include climate change, in-country migration, and asteroid detection (conducted between 2011 and 2013).
• 2012: Animal Charity Evaluators is founded.
• 2013: The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence becomes MIRI
• 2014: The first EA Survey is run. The most popular orgs people mention as donation targets are (in order) AMF, SCI, GiveDirectly, MIRI, GiveWell, CFAR, Deworm the World, Vegan Outreach,  the Humane League, and 80,000 Hours.
  • To be fair, the numbers look pretty similar for the 2019 survey, though they are dwarfed by donations from Open Phil and other large funders.

Depending on where you count the "starting point", it took between 5 and 7 years to get from "effective giving should exist" to something resembling our present distribution of causes.

In the seven years since, we've seen:

• The launch of multiple climate-focused charity recommenders (I'd argue that the Clean Air Task Force is now as well-established an "EA charity" as most of the charities GiveWell recommends)
• The rise of wild animal suffering and AI governance/policy as areas of concern (adding a ton of depth and variety to existing cause areas — it hasn't been that long since "AI" meant MIRI's technical research and "animal advocacy" meant lobbying against factory farming when those things came up in EA)
• The founding of the Good Food Institute (2016) and alternative protein becoming "a thing"
• The founding of Charity Entrepreneurship and resultant founding of orgs focused on tobacco taxation, lead abatement, fish welfare, family planning, and other "unusual" causes
• Open Philanthropy going from a few million dollars in annual grants to in the neighborhood of ~$200 million. Alongside "standard cause area" grants, 2021 grants include $7 million for the Centre for Pesticide Suicide Prevention, $1.5 million for Fair and Just Prosecution, and $0.6 million for Abundant Housing Massachusetts (over two years — but given that the org has a staff of one person right now, I imagine that's a good chunk of their total funding)
• Three of the ten highest-karma Forum posts of all time (1, 2, 3) discuss cause areas with little existing financial support within EA

I'd hope that all this would also generate a better social environment for people to talk about different types of work — if not, individuals need better habits.

*****

Everyone reasonably familiar with EA knows that AI safety, pandemic preparedness, animal welfare and global poverty are considered EA cause areas, whereas feminism, LGBT rights, wildlife conservation and dental hygiene aren't.

I think that any of these causes could easily get a bunch of interest and support if someone published a single compelling Forum post arguing that putting some amount of funding into an existing organization or intervention would lead to a major increase in welfare.  (Maybe not wildlife conservation, because it seems insanely hard for that to be competitive with farmed animal welfare, but I'm open to having my mind blown.)

Until that post exists (or some other resource written with EA principles in mind), there's not much for a given person in the community to do. Though I do think that individuals should generally try to read more research outside of the EA-sphere, to get a better sense for what's out there.

If someone is reading this and wants to try writing a compelling post about a new area, I'd be psyched to hear about it!

Or, if you aren't sure what area to focus on, but want to embrace the challenge of opening a new conversation, I've got plenty of suggestions for you (starting here).

*****

However, this calculus can be somewhat incomplete, as it doesn’t take into account the personal circumstances of the particular biologist debating her career. What if she’s a very promising cancer researcher (as a result of her existing track record, reputation or professional inclinations) but it’s not entirely clear how she’d do in the space of clean meat? What if she feels an intense inner drive working on cancer (since her mother died of melanoma)? These considerations should factor in when she tries to estimate her expected career-long impact.

I think that very few people in this community would disagree, at least in the example you've put forth.

*****

From my experience, a biologist choosing to spend her career doing cancer research would often feel inferior to other EAs choosing a more EA-stereotypic career such as pandemic preparedness or clean meat. When introducing herself in front of other EAs, she may start with an apology like “What I’m working on isn’t really related to EA”.

What if we tried more actively to let people feel that whatever they want to work on is really fine, and simply tried to support and help them do it better through evidence and reason?

This is where I agree with you, in that I strongly support "letting people feel that what they want to work on is fine" and "not making people feel apologetic about what they do".

But I'm not sure how many people actually feel this way, or whether the way people respond to them actually generates this kind of feeling. My experience is that when people tell me they work on something unusual, I try to say things like "Cool!" and "What's that like?" and "What do you hope to accomplish with that?" and "Have you thought about writing this up on the Forum?" (I don't always succeed, because small talk is an imperfect art, but that's the mindset.)

I'd strongly advocate for other people in social settings also saying things like this. Maybe the most concrete suggestion from here is for EA groups, and orgs that build resources for them, to encourage this more loudly than they do now? I try to be loud, here and in the EA Newsletter, but I'm one person :-(

*****

I think that the EA community should be a big tent for people who want to do a better job of measuring and increasing their impact, no matter what they work on.

I think that EA research should generally examine a wide range of options in a shallow way, before going deeper on more promising options (Open Phil's approach). But EA researchers should look at whatever seems interesting or promising to them, as long as they understand that getting funded to pursue research will probably require presenting strong evidence of impact/promise to a funder.

I think that EA funding should generally be allocated based on the best analysis we can do on the likely impact of different work. But EA funders should fund whatever seems interesting or promising to them, as long as they understand that they'll probably get less impact if they fund something that few other people in the community think is a good funding target. (Value of learning is real, and props to small funders who make grants with a goal of learning more about some area.)

I think that EA advice should try to work out what the person being advised actually wants — is it "have an impactful career in dental hygiene promotion", or "have an impactful career, full stop"? Is it "save kids from cancer", or "save kids, full stop"? 

And I think we should gently nudge people to consider the "full stop" options, because the "follow your passions wherever they go" argument seems more common in the rest of society than it ought to be. Too many people choose a cause or career based on a few random inputs ("I saw a movie about it", "I got into this lab and not that lab", "I needed to pay off my student loans ASAP") without thinking about a wide range of options first.

But in the end, there's nothing wrong with wanting to do a particular thing, and trying to have the most impact you can with the thing you do. This should be encouraged and celebrated, whether or not someone chooses to donate to it.

Thank you for putting this together, I strongly agree with many of these points, especially the point of independent thinking. 

I think the strength of this post's argument varies when taking into account different "services" that the EA movement can provide individuals. For instance, for someone in their mid-career who is interested in EA in order to rethink their career path, there would be much more value in a more divergent EA movement that is focused on the  EA toolkit. 
Yet, that wouldn't be the same for someone who looks for donation advice, for which we'd rather put much more focus on very few cause areas and donation opportunities.

That might also be true for someone in their early career who looks for career advice, but that would depend on how much independent thinking they're willing to do, because I strongly agree that this is missing.  I'll add a quote from a Q&A with Will MacAskill ( Aug 2020) supporting that:

Habiba: ... "What mistakes do you think most EAs, or people in the effective altruism community, are making?"

Will:  ..."more people should just be of the mind that they want to figure out the basics, not take anything for granted, and not defer to [others’ opinions].
At the moment, I think there's a very small number of people doing that, even though I regard it as the core of what EA is about."

I'm personally quite worried that the EA movement would end up filled with people who are fans of a certain cause area without being neutral about their cause.  EA shouldn't be about cheering for certain cause areas, it should be about prioritizing opportunities to do good, and not communicating this good enough internally and externally could be very dangerous for the movement in the long term and would make us miss a lot of our potential.

I've noticed that there are quite a few downvotes for this post, and not enough criticizing comments.  I'd be happy to hear others' opinions on this subject!

I think the obvious challenge here is how to be more inclusive in the ways you suggest without destroying the thing that makes EA valuable. The trouble as I see it is that you only have 4-5 words to explain an idea to most people, and I'm not sure you can cram the level of nuance you're advocating for into that for EA.

Great piece! FYI, I wrote an essay with a similar focus and some of the same arguments about five years ago called All Causes are EA Causes. This article adds some helpful arguments, though, in particular the point about the risk of being over-identified with particular cause areas undermining the principle of cause neutrality itself. I continue to be an advocate for applying EA-style critical thinking within cause areas, not just across them!

Hi,

The identification of EA with a small set of cause areas has many manifestations, but the one I’m mostly worried about is the feeling shared by many in the community that if they work on a cause that is not particularly prioritized by the movement (like feminism) then what they do "is not really EA", even if they use evidence and reason to find the most impactful avenues to tackle the problem they try to solve….However, this calculus can be somewhat incomplete, as it doesn’t take into account the personal circumstances of the particular biologist debating her career.
 

I think I strongly agree with this and I expect most EA do too. 

My interpretation is that EA as a normative, prescriptive guide for life doesn’t seem right. Indeed, if anything, there’s evidence that EA doesn’t really do a good job, or maybe even substantively neglects this while appearing to do so, in a pernicious way. From a “do no harm” perspective, addressing this is important. This seems like a “communication problem” (which seems historically undervalued in EA and other communities).

From the perspective of the entire EA movement, it might be a better strategy to allocate the few individuals who possess the rare “EA mindset” across a diverse set of causes, rather than stick everyone in the same 3-4 cause areas. Work done by EAs (who explicitly think in terms of impact) could have a multiplying effect on the work and resources that are already allocated to causes. Pioneer EAs who choose such “EA-neglected” causes can make a significant difference, just because an EA-like perspective is rare and needed in those areas, even in causes that are well-established outside of EA (like human rights or nature conservation). For example, they could carry out valuable intra-cause prioritization (as opposed to inter-cause prioritization).

This is a really different thought than your other above and I want to comment more to make sure I understand. 

While agreeing with the essence, I think I differ and I want to get at the crux of the difference:

Overall, I think “using data”, cost effective analysis, measurement and valuation, aren’t far from mainstream in major charities. To get a sense of this, I have spoken (worked with?) to leaders in say, environmental movements and they specifically “talk the talk”, e.g. there’s specific grants for “data science” like infrastructure, for example. However, while nominally trying, many of these charities don’t succeed—the reason is an immense topic beyond the scope of this comment or post. 

But the point is that  it seems hard to make these methodological or leadership changes that motivates you dissemination.

Note that it seems very likely we would agree and trust any EA who reported that any particular movement or cause area would benefit from better methods. 

However, actually effecting change is really difficult. 

To be tangible, imagine trying to get the Extinction Rebellion to use measurement and surveys to regularly interrogate their theory of change. 

For another example, the leadership and cohesion of many movements can be far lower than they appear. Together with the fact that applying reasoning might foreclose large sections of activity or initiatives, this would make implementation impractical.

While rational, data driven and reasoned approaches are valuable, it’s unclear if EA is the path to improving this, and this is a headwind to your point that EAs should disseminate widely. I guess the counterpoint would be that focus is valuable and this supports focus on cause areas closer to the normal sense that you argue against.

Thank you for the write up!

Thank you for posting. I'm sorry to hear that some people in the community have been made to feel excluded or "not EA enough", and agree with ideas already shared above about how the community can behave better.

I generally agree with Aaron's comments above, and just had a few points that I don't think people have already made:

--

our general countermeasure is to think long and hard about potential missed opportunities and candidates for cause-X, trying to study and map ever greater territories... But is it the most efficient strategy to explore the space of opportunities? I suspect that in many cases you can’t really see very clearly the full utility of acting in some space until you actually try to do it.

I agree that we shouldn't just think about other cause areas, but jumping into working on them directly is sort of on the other extreme, pretty costly. I think people wanting to assess other cause areas that seem promising should research their history, accomplishments, failures, etc. and talk to some of the key people working in those areas. I hope and expect that people working on cause prioritization are in fact doing something like this.

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From the perspective of the entire EA movement, it might be a better strategy to allocate the few individuals who possess the rare “EA mindset” across a diverse set of causes

As new potentially high-impact causes are identified, I agree, and think that this is happening. For causes which we're pretty sure are generally not as high impact, I think that EAs will most likely do more good by working within priority causes rather than working to "lift up" lower priority causes. This is based on my understanding that causes can vary in effectiveness by ~100x or more. There are surely exceptions though, where a certain intervention change in a "low priority" cause area could have a huge impact, and it'd be exciting if we found more of those opportunities.

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Minor point here, but:

If we are in the business of giving career advice to wider publics

FWIW, 80k is not in that business. They say, "Our advice is focused on people who have the good fortune to have options for how to spend their career, and who want to make helping the world one of their main goals. We especially focus on college students and graduates living in rich countries like the U.S. or U.K. who want to take an analytical approach to doing good."

A minor point, but I think this overestimates the extent to which a small number of people with an EA mindset can help in crowded cause areas that lack such people. Like, I don't think PETA's problem is that there's nobody there talking about impact and effectiveness. Or rather, that is their problem, but adding a few people to do that wouldn't help much, because they wouldn't be listened to. The existing internal political structures and discourse norms of these spaces aren't going to let these ideas gain traction, so while EAs in these areas might be able to be more individually effective than non-EAs, I think it's mostly going to be limited to projects they can do more or less on their own, without much support from the wider community of people working in the area.

Love this article! As a new EA person, I appreciate this way of thinking, but I’m not willing to give up on some causes that I care about more due to life experiences than any kind of logic. If I didn’t give to them the alternative wouldn’t to give more to givewell, the alternative would be to not give that money at all.

One downside of this is that without some cause curation, you could end up with zero sum games when charities or causes were in opposition - encouraging more effectiveness from feminists and MRAs, nuclear power advocates vs Greenpeace, gun control charities and the NRA, etc.

That's not to say a greater emphasis away from central cause areas would be bad, just not an uncritical one.