I am at the conference now so voice recorded this and used an LLM to clean up prose. N.B. wrote this in <30 min so it is very rough--but I thought speed was more relevant than polish given timeliness of the conference happening now
Lewis Bollard opened EAG London with the first social reform movement: abolitionism. He touched on others too, including Henry Spira bringing McDonald's to the table instead of demanding they stop serving meat. His argument: the through-line from them to EA is three virtues (altruism, radical empathy, and ambitious pragmatism). On the latter, the original abolitionists choosing the slave trade over slavery because it was winnable. Compromise as the price of victory.
I've spent my career in movements and systems change: getting community health workers salaried and accredited as national policy, the unglamorous machinery of #HealthforAll. This looks like approaching a problem by asking what conditions are holding the problem in place and changing them. i.e. Playing general manager for a whole problem, the way Lewis does for ending factory farming. I really, really dug his talk.
It also confused me. Because what he celebrated is not what I understood EA to be. From the outside (this is my first EAG), EA comes off as cost-per-outcome driven, and (particularly in GHD) a this manifests as huge emphasis on direct delivery: i.e. the bednet, not the movement that makes governments guarantee the right to health. Lewis spent his talk on scale, system change, and narrative reform, whereas my impression was that the question EA is obsessed with is the measurable marginal dollar, not the big system bet.
Relatedly, what struck me most in my first 12 hours @ EAG is EA clearly does believe in movement-building in the sense thatit spends an enormous amount on its own! EAG, 80,000 Hours, the fellowships, the community-building grants, this whole beautifully run machine (thank you, swapcard). So the conviction is there but it just seems to (largely) run inward, toward growing EA, rather than outward, toward funding the kind of movements Lewis spent 25 minutes admiring.
I may be wrong about my sense of mismatch and I'd like to be. Who here works on scale, systems change, narrative reform (esp in health delivery)? Am curious about those who have made the “GM for an entire problem” approach legible within EA rather than optimizing one slice of it.
Hey Madeleine! Good question. You might want to change the title to make it more descriptive, i.e. something like "Which EA organisations are working on systemic change?".
PS- the answer is lots. LEEP gets governments to enforce laws around lead in paint and food, Legal Impact for Chickens is trying to change how laws are applied (as is THL UK), Pause AI routes through a mass movement, etc...
When you get into it, the distinction between 'systemic change' and 'measurable intervention' is a spectrum rather than a binary. There are EA interventions at most points along that spectrum.
Appreciate it, Toby. Have done so! Thanks for the LEEP rec. My outside impression was that the gravity pulls hard toward the measurable end over the further-out bets (mass movements, narrative, constituency-building). Am curious who is thinking about health delivery policy change and welcome all such leads.
Would also love to explore the spectrum idea. My sense is there a) are a couple of axes that correlate: how upstream the lever is (service delivery → rules → institutions) and how easily you can measure and attribute the result (measurable/attributable → diffuse/long-horizon). B) That the distribution is lopsided…but I am interested in outliers! Particularly for reasons of scale and/or permanent norm change (à la abolition example)
Does Pause AI consider itself EA though?
That's reasonable, I have no idea. Definitely a fellow traveller though (they come to the conferences, work from the offices, etc...).
I'm sure there are many more examples of what I'm pointing at here that are closer to 'EA'.