EA - Making Effective Altruism Enormous by Davidmanheim

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: Making Effective Altruism Enormous, published by Davidmanheim on July 24, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. When planning a project, a key question is what success looks like. What does Effective Altruism look like if it is successful? I think a lot of the answer is that, as a social movement, it’s successful if its ideas are adopted and its goals are pursued - not just by proponents, but by the world. Which leads me to a simple conclusion: Effective Altruism is at least three orders of magnitude too small - and probably more than that. And I think that the movement has been hampered by thinking about a scale far, far too small to maximize its impact - which is the goal. I’ll talk about three specific aspects where I think EA can and should scale. Dollars donated Cause areas being worked on People who are involved I want to lay out the case of what it looks like for this to change, and inter-alia, suggest how all three of these are connected - because I don’t think any of them will grow anything like significantly enough without the other two. 1. Funding Funding today At present, EA donors have an uncommitted pool of tens of billions of dollars - though it can’t all be liquidated tomorrow. But that isn’t enough to fully fund everything we know is very valuable. Givewell has recently raised its funding bar to 8x giving directly, and has a $200m shortfall this year. We fully expect that there will be more money in the future - but no-one seems to be claiming that the amounts available would be enough to, say, raise the standard of living in sub-Saharan Africa by even a factor of two, to one fifteenth of the level in the United States. That would take far more money. The funding we should aim for The obvious goal should be to get to the point where we’re funding everything better than giving directly, and funding that, as well. We’re talking about a minimum of tens of billions of dollars per year, plausibly far more. This cannot possibly be sustained by finding more billionaires, unless wealth inequality rises even faster than interest in EA. We need more people, and clearly, if the money is supposed to go to improving the world, not everyone can be hired by EA orgs. Instead, I claim we need to go back and enable the original vision of many EA founders, who were simply looking to maximize their charitable impact. That is, we need people to earn-to-give in the normal sense - having a job they like, living a normal life, and donating perhaps 10% of their income to effective charity. And that’s a sustainable vision for a movement that can be embraced by hundreds of millions or billions of people. And as an aside, if the ideas are widely embraced, it’s also far more likely to be embraced by politicians for allocation of international aid, and create even more value democratically. Scale likely requires diversifying cause areas Alongside this, if and as effective altruism gets larger, the set of things effective altruists focus on will need to expand. If the EA donor base grows enough, we will fill the current funding gap for EA organizations. And a broad base of supporters will have a small segment who will work more directly on these issues. Scaling the interventions gets us only so far - there will be a need for more causes. We will hopefully quickly fill the funding gaps for scaling newer ideas, and need to expand. Once we can save every life that can be saved for $10,000, we will need to move on to more and more expensive interventions, interventions that address welfare, preventative healthcare for the uninsured in wealthy countries, and so on. If we successfully scale, the world will be a better and very different place. 2. Cause Areas As mentioned, there are a few reasons to expand cause areas over time. But before doing so, there is a conceptual elephant in the ...