Rhodri Davies on why he's not an EA

Thanks for posting this, super interesting! I was nicely surprised to find this forum post in the Wikipedia page on the "Scientific Charity Movement".

I think that post highlights some important differences. Some interesting quotes:
> EAs are also much less confident that they know what people need better than they do.
> To many EAs, dividing the poor into deserving and undeserving groups just doesn't make sense
> standards of evidence are much better now than they were over a century ago
> errors of charity that EA is a response to generally include the errors of SC
> The main way I see the comparison as a warning is that EA could end up somewhere where EA continues to talk in a scientific way, confidence goes up, standards of evidence fall, and EA ends up pushing hard on things that aren't actually that important.

Another spiritual EA predecessor is the Efficiency Movement . Focusing on improving the efficiency of existing institutions to improve public welfare, EM had a lot of support from philanthropists like Rockefeller and Carnegie, politicians like Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover and other notable figures like Brandeis and Bedeux. While not a 1-to-1 comparison, I think the focus on methodology and process analysis to maximise societal good across diverse cause areas appealed to the same demographic.

It's like if EA managed to secure the backing of all the FAANG founders, several POTUSes and broad support in activist organisations. Apparently, it did inspire business process innovations, modern conservationism and antitrust initiatives, tackling major issues of the time.

I can't find info on the "downfall" of EM. It seems to have just faded out of the public spotlight postwar. Perhaps it focused too much on few influential decision makers instead of appealing to the public. Like how Elon Musk, Vitalik Buterin and SBF are extremely supportive of EA, but the public doesn't associate any of them as "EA public figures" unless they actively look.

EA is strategic charity. Strategic thought has a long, rich history, in politics, business, and the military. I just read Lawrence Freeman’s “Strategy,” an enormous history of strategic thought.

One thing I learned is that it’s normal for a pressing need, like strategic action, to have a history of prior theories that made sense in context, and that gave way, matured, or became richer with further strands of thought over time. I expect the same will happen with EA. That’s perfectly compatible with EA being a leading and important strand of philanthropic thought in the present, with further contributions to make in the coming decades.

There’s an essay on Philo’s substack pointing out that Netflix was just cable over the internet, but that the differences between Netflix and cable were still large enough to be a game-changer. Likewise, humans and chips are very different, yet share 99% of their DNA. EA can have similarities to earlier charity movements, yet be more different than similar in its effects. We should be careful about the tendency to stop at “scientific philanthopy. You invented scientific philanthropy.” The details and execution matter. If anything, the history of prior attempts shows a persistent need for the sort of thing EA is trying to accomplish.

I’d also point out that EA can benefit from contextualizing it in the present, not just the past. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation (is it still called that?) isn’t EA, but they approach philanthropy using many of the same lenses that EA does. There’s a general push to allocate resources to target the most important, tractable, and neglected levers for making a difference in well-run government agencies, even if they don’t explicitly use the ITN framework. EA can be seen as part of a larger push to rationalize public services and allocate resources efficiently. Again, the details that make EA different from these other efforts are key, but I think that a narrative of EA as the latest in a long line of failed and faded attempts to rationalize altruism gives a different feeling that seeing it as part of a vibrant and wide ranging push across many philanthropic and public services to serve the public good more strategically.

I certainly see the parallels with 19th century technocratic progressivism  (which for all its faults seems to have had a positive influence on net), and I am not questioning the author's broader point that "improving philanthropy can be a dangerous business".

Now, if you look at the specifics of what the Charity Society Organization believed, I find it unlikely EAs would make the same sort of mistakes. 

- The idea that private charity is intrinsically preferrable to public spending when it comes to alleviating poverty is not really an EA  issue. The movement was not created in opposition to public spending and has never set out to draw that sort of separation line (to my knowledge). My read is that you can easily be pro-EA as a social democrat or Third Way type who would welcome higher public spending on anti-poverty programmes, provided they achieve their goals. There is no particular tension there.

- The idea that there are deserving and undeserving poor seems to be in direct contradiction with the sort of broad-based, every-human-being-matters, "utilitarian-ish" worldview that you often find at the moral core of EA.

- As for the appeal of eugenism, I am somewhat more worried that similar mistakes might happen, since certain brands of utilitarianism have served as a gateway drug to that thinking in the past. However the EA approach to utilitarianism seems to be a lot more sophisticated. So far I haven't seen any particular tendency for EA to propose Bond-villain schemes that would directly harm others "for the greater good". 

However, if I try to abstract away some of the common elements between those past mistakes, there does seem to be a pattern we can learn from, namely:

• Do not turn use rationality as a cover for contemptuous views of others
• Do not presuppose you know better than others what's good for them
• Do not try to do good in spite of people, or against their consent
• If "rationality", "science" or "efficiency" lead you to extraordinarily strange, "yuck" actions that cause direct harm to others, there's a good chance the "yuck" factor is not just your irrationality speaking. You're probably just wrong.

Thought it was a cool article!  Particularly liked his self reflection at the end.  I think finding ways to integrate some but not all EA principles, or to adhere moderately rather than totally, are really valuable. 

Just in terms of the title of this post, he is quick to clarify that the title of his article is:

'Why am I not an EA?' 

rather than 

'What I am not and EA.'

Which I think this title kind of misses...

I'm probably just being pedantic though.  Thanks for sharing. 

I had never heard of any of these predecessor movements to EA! Would love to read more history about the Charity Organisation Society, the Scientific Philanthropy movement, or the Efficiency Movement.