Extended anecdote from My Willing Complicity In "Human Rights Abuse", by a former doctor (GP) working at a Qatari visa center in India to process "the enormous number of would-be Indian laborers who wished to take up jobs there":

Another man comes to mind (it is not a coincidence that the majority of applicants were men). He was a would-be returnee - he had completed a several year tour of duty in Qatar itself, for as long as his visa allowed, and then returned because he was forced to, immediately seeking reassessment so he could head right back. He had worked as a truck driver, and now wanted to become a personal chauffeur instead.

He had been away for several years and had not returned a moment before he was compelled to. He had family: a wife and a young son, as well as elderly parents. All of them relied on him as their primary breadwinner. I asked him if he missed them. Of course he did. But love would not put food on the table. Love would not put his son into a decent school and ensure that he picked up the educational qualifications that would break the cycle. Love would not ensure his elderly and increasingly frail parents would get beyond-basic medical care and not have to till marginal soil at the tiny plot of land they farmed.

But the labor he did out of love and duty would. He told me that he videocalled them every night, and showed me that he kept a picture of his family on his phone. He had a physical copy close at hand, tucked behind the transparent case. It was bleached by the sun to the point of illegibility and half-covered by what I think was a small-denomination Riyal note.

He said this all in an incredibly matter-of-fact way. I felt my eyes tear up, and I looked away so he wouldn't notice. ... 

I asked him how well the job paid. Well enough to be worth it, he told me. He quoted a figure that was not very far from my then monthly salary of INR 76,000 (about $820 today). Whatever he made there, I noted that I had made about the same while working as an actual doctor in India in earlier jobs. ... He expected a decent bump - personal drivers seemed to be paid slightly better than commercial operators. 

I asked him if he had ever worked similar roles in India. He said he had. He had made a tenth the money, in conditions far worse than what he would face in Qatar. He, like many other people I interviewed, viewed the life you have the luxury of considering inhumane and unpalatable, and deemed it a strict improvement to the status quo. He was eager to be back. He was saddened that his son would continue growing up in his absence, but he was optimistic that the boy would understand why his father did what he had to do. ...

By moving to the Middle East, he was engaged in arbitrage that allowed him to make a salary comparable to the doctor seeing him in India. I look at how much more I make after working in the NHS and see a similar bump. ...

... "exploitation" is a word with a definition, and that definition requires something more than "a transaction that takes place under conditions of inequality." If we define exploitation as taking unfair advantage of vulnerability, we need a story about how the worker is made worse off relative to the alternative - and the workers I spoke with, consistently and across months, told me the opposite story. ... They are adults making difficult tradeoffs under difficult constraints, the same tradeoffs that educated Westerners make constantly but with much less margin for error and no safety net.

I do not recall ever outright rejecting an applicant for a cause that couldn't be fixed, but even the occasional instances where I had to turn them away and ask them to come back after treatment hurt. Both of us - there was often bargaining and disappointment that cut me to the bone. I do not enjoy making people sad, even if my job occasionally demands that of me. I regret making them spend even more of their very limited money and time on followups and significant travel expenses, even if I was duty-bound to do so on occasion. 

Zooming out to the author's main argument:

The argument generally goes: This job involves intense heat, long hours, and low pay relative to Western minimum wages. Therefore, it is inherently exploitative, and anyone taking it must be a victim of coercion or deception.

This completely ignores the economic principle of revealed preferences: the idea that you can tell what a person actually values by observing what they choose to do under constraint. Western pundits sit in climate-controlled pods and declare that nobody should ever have to work in forty-degree heat for $300 a month. But for someone whose alternative is working in forty-degree heat in Bihar for $30 a month with no social safety net, banning Qatari labor practices just destroys their highest expected-value option. ...

The economic case for Gulf migration from South Asia is almost embarrassingly strong when you actually look at it. India received roughly $120 billion in remittances in 2023, making it the world's largest recipient, with Gulf states still accounting for a very large share, though the RBI's own survey data show that advanced economies now contribute more than half of India's remittances. For certain origin states - Kerala being the clearest case, alongside Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu - remittance income is not a rounding error in household economics; it is the household economy. The man sending money home from Doha is participating in a system that has done more for South Asian poverty alleviation than most bilateral aid programs combined.

It's a bummer that this situation is hard to improve affordability-, accessibility-, and safety-wise. CE-incubated Rahi Impact tried, but after deeper and frankly disheartening-to-read investigation concluded this was neither tractable nor cost-effective for them due to inability to source jobs at scale from Gulf employers due to their commitment to ethical recruitment disadvantaging them -- folks are so desperate to work in the Gulf that the resulting huge labor oversupply gives Gulf employers significant leverage which they use to monetise visas by demanding bribes from recruiting agents for access to job slots, which then get passed on to workers as exorbitant fees or garnished pay (worth 2.5 years of wages in their home country, a lot of this paid upfront). The recruiters also screw over the workers often enough to drive a ~30% migration failure rate, here's a real case study from Rahi's investigation:

Case Study: Fraudulent Practices in Migration  Asif (name changed), a 34-year-old from India, faced mounting debts that forced him to seek work abroad. In March 2023, he left behind his small garment shop, lured by the promise of higher wages and stable employment in the Gulf. However, his journey soon turned into a costly ordeal. Through a recommendation from his in-laws, Asif found an agent in a nearby city who charged $1,440 for a job as a helper in the GCC. Trusting both the recommendation and the apparent seniority of the agent, Asif paid the amount and traveled to Mumbai to complete the required migration steps. Once there, he was stranded—his agent disappeared, and phone calls went unanswered. Desperate to recover his losses, Asif sought advice from a family friend, who recommended a different agent. Acting on this recommendation, he paid $920 for a two-month visitor visa to Dubai, with the promise that it would be converted into a work visa. In Dubai, he was put to work in a laundry, packing clothes, but he faced severe exploitation. Although promised $290 per month, he received only $220 and worked 19-hour shifts without overtime pay. Since he was on a visitor visa, he had no legal recourse. When Asif could no longer endure the conditions, he paid for his own return ticket home. Unfortunately, at the airport he discovered he had overstayed his visa by 20 days and incurred a $290 fine.  In total, Asif believes he wasted two years and suffered a financial loss of over $2,300. Like many, Asif fell victim to false promises and desperation. Yet, with no opportunities at home and debts still unpaid, he remains willing to take the risk again—highlighting the dire reality for many low-skilled workers in South Asia.

Asif will still try it again, damn. 

As a silver lining, Rahi's cofounders list many other potential impactful solutions to be trialed for improving Gulf migration from South Asia for the >1.2 million workers who make the journey every year. But I think the ex-GP's point stands that taking away the option to work in the Gulf, exploitation and fraud and elevated death risk included, is a non-solution, it would make things even worse than not doing anything at all. 

It does seem like some of the "serious" GHD discussion is moving off the forum, e.g. later today I'm attending this online workshop (more info) that touches on your 3rd bullet. This seems part of the wider trend of decision-influencing discussion becoming internalised due to the professionalisation of EA GHD, which probably absorbed some of the best early commenters into these orgs. Holden's 2014 writeup on the challenges of transparency seems loosely related if not exactly the same. 

Maybe a fortnightly poll on each of those X vs Y topics? Or more cross-posting from GHD substacks like yours, Hannah Ritchie's, David Nash's, Lant Pritchett's etc.

James' post did provide an example: the Maternal Health Initiative shut down due to their pilot results not yielding the 10% shift in contraceptive uptake their CEA informed them to aim for. Maybe this wasn't what you were looking for?

AI race accelerant -> shorter timelines -> riskier for everyone (not just EA) was my read.

I think it's more nuanced than just "the EA movement neglects systemic change", since even as far back as 2015 Rob Wiblin at 80K could list all these systemic change initiatives: 

Here are some people who identify as effective altruists working on systemic change:

• Most recent Open Philanthropy research and grants, on immigration reform, criminal justice reform, macroeconomics, and international development, are clearly focussed on huge structural changes of various kinds.
• The OpenBorders.info website collates research on and promotes the option of dramatic increases in migration from poor to rich countries.
• A new startup called EA Policy, recommended for financial support by my colleagues at EA Ventures, is testing the impact of making submissions to open policy forums held by the US Government during this summer.
• Our colleagues at the Global Priorities Project research what should be the most important reform priorities for governments, and how they can improve cost-benefit and decision-making processes.
• One of GiveWell’s main goals from the beginning, perhaps it’s primary goal, has been to change the cultural norms within the nonprofit sector, and the standards by which they are judged by donors. They wanted to make it necessary for charities to be transparent with donors about their successes and failures, and run projects that actually helped recipients. They have already significantly changed the conversation around charitable giving.
• Giving What We Can representatives have met with people in the UK government about options for improving aid effectiveness. One of its first and most popular content page debunks myths people cite when opposing development aid. One of the first things I wrote when employed by Giving What We Can was on the appropriate use of discounts rates by governments delivering health services. Until recently one Giving What We Can member, who we know well, was working at the UK’s aid agency DfID.
• Some 80,000 Hours alumni, most of whom unfortunately would rather remain anonymous, are going into politics, think-tanks, setting up a labour mobility organisations or businesses that facilitate remittance flows to the developing world.
• Several organisations focussed on existential risk (FHI, CSER and FLI jump to mind) take a big interest in government policies, especially those around the regulation of new technologies, or institutions that can improve inter-state cooperation and prevent conflict.
• 80,000 Hours alumni and effective altruist charities work on or donate to lobbying efforts to improve animal welfare regulation, such as Humane Society US-FARM. Other activists are working for dramatic society-wide changes in how society views the moral importance of non-human animals.

Rob's guesses at how this perception that EA neglects systemic change might've formed:

• ‘earning to give’ was one of our most media friendly and viral ideas, and has dominated coverage of 80,000 Hours and effective altruism among the general public, to our growing consternation. Earning to give is usually perceived as anti-systemic change.
  In fact, someone who ‘earned to give’ in order to pay the salary of someone else working for systemic change is working for systemic change themselves. In that sense ‘earning to give’ is simply neutral on the systemic vs non-systemic change issue. Communist revolutionary Friedrich Engels is a classic example of this approach, though my guess is he personally did more harm than good.
  I would also argue though that creating a social expectation that to be decent people, the rich should give away a large fraction of their wealth to others, is itself a form of systemic change.
• Effective altruists are usually not radicals or revolutionaries, as is apparent from my list above. My attitude, looking at history, is that sudden dramatic changes in society usually lead to worse outcomes than gradual evolutionary improvements. I am keen to tinker with government or economic systems to make them work better, but would only rarely want to throw them out and rebuild from scratch. I personally favour maintaining and improving mostly market-driven economies, though some of my friends and colleagues hope we can one day do much better. Regardless, this temperament for ‘crossing the river by feeling the stones’ is widespread among effective altruists, and in my view that’s a great thing that can help us avoid the mistakes of extremists through history. The system could be a lot better, but one only need look at history to see that it could also be much worse.
  However, even this remains only an empirically founded belief – if I find evidence that revolutionary change has been better than I thought, I will reconsider working for revolutionary changes.
• Effective altruists prefer to pursue systemic changes that are more likely to be achieved, all else equal. Sometimes we view existing attempts at systemic change as more symbolic or idealistic than realistic, and so push back against them. For example I wrote a post years ago about why it’s not a good use of time to work on US gun control. Of course this is nothing to do with systemic change specifically: we frequently also push back against non-systemic approaches that we don’t expect to help others very much. And I try to apply my pragmatism to the systemic changes that in my heart I would love to love: enthusiastic as I am about opening borders, it may be an impossible ask in the current political climate.
• We have been taking on the enormous problem of ‘how to help others do the most good’ and had to start somewhere. The natural place for us, GiveWell and other research groups to ‘cut our teeth’ was by looking at the cause areas and approaches where the empirical evidence was strongest, such as the health improvement from anti-malarial bednets, or determining in which careers people could best ‘earn to give’.
  Having learned from that research experience we are in a better position to evaluate approaches to systemic change, which are usually less transparent or experimental, and compare them to non-systemic options. This is very clear from the case of the Open Philanthropy, which is branching out from GiveWell and is more open to high-risk and ‘unproven’ approaches like political advocacy than GiveWell itself.

This is a 10+ year old snapshot of the EA movement's efforts w.r.t. systemic change. I wouldn't be surprised if there's been much more since, e.g. some ACX grantees, some funders' funds, etc. I do think there's something to the critique, but I'd like to understand it better.

Possibly complementary: Linch's Some unfun lessons I learned as a junior grantmaker.  

Ozy Brennan's Identifying healthy high-demand groups summarises takeaways from Abuses in the Religious Life and the Path to Healing, a book about spiritual abuse written by Dysmas de Lassus, the prior general (person in charge) of the Order of Carthusians. I've spent most of my life in high-demand groups of all kinds so this was interesting to read.

A high-demand group having a lot of people with good virtues isn't a sign it's healthy; toxic groups can have even more of these virtues:

There is no general pattern where people in healthy high-demand communities are, compared to people in toxic high-demand communities, more hardworking, generous, loving, self-controlled, courageous, honest, tolerant, clever, helpful, cheerful, or even compassionate (to outsiders).

Toxic high-demand communities often create a culture of competition to be the most ethical. ... So a toxic high-demand community can have more virtuous members and a greater positive impact on the world than a good high-demand community. 

At the same time, toxic high-demand communities generally pervert genuine virtues... For Catholics, humility becomes self-hatred; the desire to give of yourself to others becomes complete self-denial; forgiveness becomes forgetting the crimes of unrepentant abusers. For rationalists and effective altruists, consequentialism becomes tolerance of wrongdoing because of some far-off future benefit; agency and taking ideas seriously become hearing a bad argument and doing arbitrary bad stuff because of it... The members of a toxic Catholic community may well come off as humble, self-sacrificing, and forgiving; the members of a toxic effective altruist community, consequentialist, agentic, and dedicated to self-improvement.

Actual signs of a high-demand group being healthy:

A healthy high-demand community is patient with its members. It doesn’t expect perfection immediately. It doesn’t hold people to unreasonable standards. It accepts that mistakes and failures are part of the human condition. ...

One of the most important green flags in a high-demand community is the personality of the high-status people. High-status people should readily admit that they make mistakes, believe wrong things, and have personality flaws. ... High-status people should be aware of the suffering of those around them, particularly suffering that’s related to the beliefs and commandments of the high-demand group. If possible, high-status people should do something to alleviate the suffering of group members; if not possible, they should provide comfort and understanding. Most of all, high-status people should be genuinely kind. Not righteous, not self-sacrificing, not heroic, not good. Kind. ...

Any high-demand community is going to make a lot of rules about how you live your life—it’s inherent to the enterprise—but a healthy high-demand community limits its rules to those matters which are really important... As much as is practicable, a good high-demand community allows you to make your own judgments about how to put rules into practice in your own life. ...

In particular, the community and the high-status people should encourage you to take independent initiative... High-status people should praise you for coming up with your own ideas and projects. They should provide help, especially help that isn’t too costly for them (such as making introductions or publicly announcing your project at a meeting).

The simplest criterion de Lassus lays out is the most powerful: are you happy?

Young me used to be confused when people asked "are you happy?" in relation to the high-demand groups I was in. How was personal happiness at all relevant to the collective mission, from which purpose derives? Later on I would meet plenty of excited members of high-demand groups, which was quite the update; there were in fact people in the "ideal" quadrant:

No one can promise you a life without suffering. Being part of a high-demand group may well make you suffer more. ... But ultimately, most of the time, if you’re part of a healthy high-demand group, you should feel a sense of peace and joy. You should reflect on your life, or at least those parts influenced by the high-demand group, and think you know, I’m glad I’m doing this. When it comes right down to it, I like the way my life is going.

Toxic groups are aware that people prefer to stay in groups that make them happy, so they Goodhart it. Often, a group will teach that not being happy is a sin, or that crying yourself to sleep is real joy, a deep and pure kind of joy that the uninitiated would mistake for misery. But, even if the group is gaslighting you, you can still tell how you feel. Take a few hours by yourself or with a trusted friend and reflect: how do I feel about my life? Is my life okay? Do I feel simple pleasures, such as appreciation of a sunrise or companionship with friends or satisfaction at a job well done? If I look back on the past year or two, do I feel a sense of contentment about how it went?

If you are persistently unhappy, the high-demand group may be toxic or it might be all right. But it is clearly wrong for you.

(related)

I anticipate that I'll pay my impact bills this way, but I'm not maximizing impact. I'm maximizing EA ideas.

Would you mind saying more? Not a reasoning-transparent justification, more so a sketch of the high-level generators. Wondering if it's along the lines of Richard Ngo's

I think “maximize expected utility while obeying some constraints” looks very different from actually taking non-consequentialist decision procedures seriously. In principle the utility-maximizing decision procedure might not involve thinking about “impact” at all. And this is not even an insane hypothetical, IMO thinking about impact is pretty corrosive to one’s ability to do excellent research for example.

Mechanics-wise it can take many forms, e.g. the FTXFF regranting program, THL's supported regranting, EA AWF, Giving Green, Manifund, etc (pretty sure you know all this! sharing for others too). Probably a committee structure already centralises things a bit much, contra the decentralisation + worldview diversification motivations behind regranting, although it may have its advantages from a capacity-building POV since centralisation enables specialisation. 

Giving Green are welcome to correct me on this (I'm invoking Cunningham's law here) -- the impression I got from their strategy report is "this isn't that straightforward to answer"

• while they don't explicitly define biodiversity loss, let alone use a single quantitative metric like you guessed, they do reference IUCN Red List-based "percent of species threatened with extinction" and David's dominance scores to justify their analytical focus on land use change as the most dominant biodiversity loss driver

• the metrics they looked at for their "problem scale" heuristic for assessing philanthropic strategies are varied:

For land use change, we looked at the surface area of land conversion avoided as a heuristic for scale, while weighing this against the importance of different biomes in terms of ecosystem services. For overfishing, we used heuristics such as the harmfulness and extent of fishing practices and the percentage of fish caught.

• they pragmatically proxied loss reduction by focusing on loss drivers instead, which are the subject of most of the report, as that's where comparative data is available:

Because biodiversity is an inherently multi-dimensional and non-fungible good,
comparing specific impact strategies in terms of scale is methodologically challenging.
For this reason, we prioritized among the five direct drivers of biodiversity loss, for which
quantitative comparisons in scale exist.

• the loss driver indicator they picked, ecosystem services, is focused on the benefits humans derive from ecosystems so my guess to your 2nd question is "probably not", but they did guardrail against strategies potentially harmful to animals, cf. these 2 guiding principles (out of 8 total) they used to identify promising funding opportunities:

Ecosystem services: While there are many indicators for biodiversity, we decided
to focus on ecosystem services as the biodiversity indicator to prioritize. Since
ecosystem services describe the benefits that humans derive from ecosystems,
this definition is closest to Giving Greenʼs mission to maximize human and
ecological well-being. In practice, there are often no concrete quantitative
indicators of ecosystem services for the strategies that we evaluate, so we often
rely on heuristics from other indicators.

Co-benefits for humans and animals: In principle, co-benefits for human health,
development, and animal welfare were not part of our prioritization, but we took
care to not recommend strategies that may cause harm.

• They referenced the Ecosystem Services Valuation Database for the data above, which yields tables like this, caveating that these estimates "are compiled across multiple studies which differ in methods and scope, and therefore should only be seen as a rough indication of the monetary value of different biomes rather than an exact comparison"

Why not just pick number of species going extinct? My guess is the argument across these scattered quotes from Founders Pledge's guide to ecosystem philanthropy, cited in GG's report:

... while biodiversity is a useful measure of an ecosystem’s organizational and structural health, it should not be used as the sole objective to maximize for philanthropists who are interested in the protection of ecosystems more broadly. Intuitively one might argue that conservation should maximize the world’s biodiversity as the abundance and diversity of species are worth protecting. However, using biodiversity as its own metric runs into various issues (see Brennan and Lo 2022 for a further overview). ...

Biodiversity vs wilderness

The focus of protecting and restoring ecosystems is to preserve the natural state of an ecosystem before human interference. This focus on wilderness (or naturalness) often comes in conflict with pure biodiversity maximization. For example, in arid ecosystems, human use can bring about higher biodiversity: a farm built in a desert landscape will provide more habitat for species than the original ecosystem did. Similarly, Brennan (1988) describes temperate forests in which limited land clearing increases the diversity of tree species. A response to this critique might be that, at least among conservation projects, one should choose those that most guard against biodiversity loss. However, even in this limited case, biodiversity is just one consideration among many. Many areas that are regarded as important to conserve, such as many US national parks, are generally lower in biodiversity and instead prized because they are deemed aesthetic or sublime (Sarkar 2005). As such, a primary focus on biodiversity would likely rule out many ecosystems widely deemed important to conserve and could even suggest actions that would go against the preservation of natural ecosystems. Rather, biodiversity should be one consideration among many.

Biodiversity vs Ecosystem Vigor & Services

Many of the most productive ecosystems are not very species-rich. Similarly, the ecosystems that provide the most services for humans are on average lower in biodiversity (such as salt marshes for water filtration). As such, a focus on biodiversity alone might lead to prioritizing ecosystems that are high in different species but are not vibrant in the sense that they contain relatively few ecological processes or provide few services for humans (Brennan and Lo 2022). Biodiversity is therefore best understood as an element of ecosystem health rather than its own metric based on which to prioritize. ...

Heuristics for prioritization

There are various metrics in the conservation field that one might use as heuristics for prioritizing. Biodiversity, the abundance and diversity of species, for example, has intuitive appeal. However, as described above, it often runs counter to other considerations such as wilderness/naturalness and the functioning of ecosystems. Another metric, ecosystem health, provides a more holistic framework to measure the ecological integrity of ecosystems. Prominent models focus on the organization and functional structures of ecosystems and their resilience. As such, they capture a more complete range of ecosystem integrity, and align more closely with the popular notion of “protecting vibrant ecosystems”. Philanthropists should focus on interventions that look at ecosystems holistically, aiming to preserve their structure, functioning, and resilience as opposed to focussing on singular metrics such as biodiversity maximization.

also re: your 2nd question, FP's guide also has a short section on how they're "uncertain about any particular prioritization (of ecosystem protection based on reducing animal suffering) at this point", due to population ethics dilemmas and uncertainty over whether wild animal lives "are on net lives of suffering", and I'm guessing GG's report implicitly adopts this stance.