Oct 19, 2019
EA Global London 2019: Day 0
Seasons pass, mountains rise, kingdoms fall, EA Global remains
Hello friends and curious enemies. As I did last year, I’ll be providing you the blow-by-blow, play-by-play of Effective Altruism’s semi-annual conference, where good, the good, and the goodly go to speak about their plans and aspirations for saving the world.
Since this may in fact be the first time you’re hearing about Effective Altruism, I’ll briefly and inaccurately describe the… movement, you could call it. Or maybe it’s a mentality. But the basics are straightforward. (Those intimately familiar with EA can turn the volume down at this point and skip to Day 1.)
Effective Altruism from this guy’s perspective
People want to do good. They’re not often effective at it.
For example, let’s pretend I really, really like ants and value their well-being. So I find a local colony in the woods near my place and dedicate my life to positively intervening in their ant lives. When a human child comes by with a stick and a malicious grin, I gently steer that child away from my precious colony. When the leaves fall and the sun hangs low and sullen in the sky, I shelter my ants from the elements with a canvas tarp and an industrial heater. And when my queen passes from these mortal halls, I back the new queen and sue for peace with rival factions — or I stomp them out, lovingly. Every day I labor and struggle for their continued flourishing.
This is of course an absurd way to express my care for ants. I’d save more ants by working a regular job and donating my money to sequestering portions of the Amazon rainforest. I could save trillions with very little personal cost.
The parallel should already be clear here, but much of what well-meaning people do throughout their lives is highly ineffective for achieving their ends. Now, we can argue whether people really are consequentialist in action (they aren’t), but it’s uncontroversial to say that we do aspire to make the best possible moral decision we can, all else being equal.
Effective Altruism is just a way of scrutinising our attempts to do good. Insofar as we have (a) stated goals and believe we want to (b) achieve them, we need to decide how best to get from (a) to (b).
In practice, this means a lot of different things to a lot of different people who call themselves Effective Altruists (EAs). In fact, there’s an entire brand of EA in which people try to figure out what causes we should even care about, assuming some basic axioms. These include caring about the suffering of conscious creatures and caring about the potential suffering and flourishing of these creatures.
For me, I take a little bit from them and a little bit from my own views. To me, it’s clear that we should care about creating effective governments that prize the above concerns — so that’s one thing I’m trying to support through groups like the Center for Election Science. I’m also concerned about our lack of clarity when it comes to knowing what kind of future we even want to live in as a species. This concern is reinforced by the strange, scary nonsense our big tech companies are doing through harvesting our data to control our behaviour and direct it toward commercial concerns.
But there’s a helluva lot more to worry about than that. We still have a non-zero chance of nuclear war that could escalate us and everything else of value off this planet just when things were getting good. Our lust for resources is vastly outstripping the supply of said resources and quietly genociding our fellow lifeforms along the way. Billions live in poverty and are prevented from reaching their experiential potential by the mere dumb fact that they were born in the wrong time and in the wrong place.
All is not lost. This is sometimes the takeaway. No, the fact that we can recognise these things is a cause for optimism. It’s only recently that we even recognised these problems. Changing the course of history takes time (to no one’s surprise but to everyone’s dismay).
