This is a special post for quick takes by Annabella Wheatley. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
Curated and popular this week
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[Cross-posted from my Substack here]
If you spend time with people trying to change the world, you’ll come to an interesting conundrum: Various advocacy groups reference previous successful social movements as to why their chosen strategy is the most important one. Yet, these groups often follow wildly different strategies from each other to achieve social change. So, which one of them is right?
The answer is all of them and none of them.
This is because many people use research and historical movements to justify their pre-existing beliefs about how social change happens. Simply, you can find a case study to fit most plausible theories of how social change happens. For example, the groups might say:
* Repeated nonviolent disruption is the key to social change, citing the Freedom Riders from the civil rights Movement or Act Up! from the gay rights movement.
* Technological progress is what drives improvements in the human condition if you consider the development of the contraceptive pill funded by Katharine McCormick.
* Organising and base-building is how change happens, as inspired by Ella Baker, the NAACP or Cesar Chavez from the United Workers Movement.
* Insider advocacy is the real secret of social movements – look no further than how influential the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights was in passing the Civil Rights Acts of 1960 & 1964.
* Democratic participation is the backbone of social change – just look at how Ireland lifted a ban on abortion via a Citizen’s Assembly.
* And so on…
To paint this picture, we can see this in action below:
Source: Just Stop Oil which focuses on…civil resistance and disruption
Source: The Civic Power Fund which focuses on… local organising
What do we take away from all this? In my mind, a few key things:
1. Many different approaches have worked in changing the world so we should be humble and not assume we are doing The Most Important Thing
2. The case studies we focus on are likely confirmation bias, where
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I speak to many entrepreneurial people trying to do a large amount of good by starting a nonprofit organisation. I think this is often an error for four main reasons.
1. Scalability
2. Capital counterfactuals
3. Standards
4. Learning potential
5. Earning to give potential
These arguments are most applicable to starting high-growth organisations, such as startups.[1]
Scalability
There is a lot of capital available for startups, and established mechanisms exist to continue raising funds if the ROI appears high. It seems extremely difficult to operate a nonprofit with a budget of more than $30M per year (e.g., with approximately 150 people), but this is not particularly unusual for for-profit organisations.
Capital Counterfactuals
I generally believe that value-aligned funders are spending their money reasonably well, while for-profit investors are spending theirs extremely poorly (on altruistic grounds). If you can redirect that funding towards high-altruism value work, you could potentially create a much larger delta between your use of funding and the counterfactual of someone else receiving those funds. You also won’t be reliant on constantly convincing donors to give you money, once you’re generating revenue.
Standards
Nonprofits have significantly weaker feedback mechanisms compared to for-profits. They are often difficult to evaluate and lack a natural kill function. Few people are going to complain that you provided bad service when it didn’t cost them anything. Most nonprofits are not very ambitious, despite having large moral ambitions. It’s challenging to find talented people willing to accept a substantial pay cut to work with you. For-profits are considerably more likely to create something that people actually want.
Learning Potential
Most people should be trying to put themselves in a better position to do useful work later on. People often report learning a great deal from working at high-growth companies, building interesting connection
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TL;DR
Exactly one year after receiving our seed funding upon completion of the Charity Entrepreneurship program, we (Miri and Evan) look back on our first year of operations, discuss our plans for the future, and launch our fundraising for our Year 2 budget.
Family Planning could be one of the most cost-effective public health interventions available. Reducing unintended pregnancies lowers maternal mortality, decreases rates of unsafe abortions, and reduces maternal morbidity. Increasing the interval between births lowers under-five mortality. Allowing women to control their reproductive health leads to improved education and a significant increase in their income. Many excellent organisations have laid out the case for Family Planning, most recently GiveWell.[1]
In many low and middle income countries, many women who want to delay or prevent their next pregnancy can not access contraceptives due to poor supply chains and high costs. Access to Medicines Initiative (AMI) was incubated by Ambitious Impact’s Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program in 2024 with the goal of increasing the availability of contraceptives and other essential medicines.[2]
The Problem
Maternal mortality is a serious problem in Nigeria. Globally, almost 28.5% of all maternal deaths occur in Nigeria. This is driven by Nigeria’s staggeringly high maternal mortality rate of 1,047 deaths per 100,000 live births, the third highest in the world. To illustrate the magnitude, for the U.K., this number is 8 deaths per 100,000 live births.
While there are many contributing factors, 29% of pregnancies in Nigeria are unintended. 6 out of 10 women of reproductive age in Nigeria have an unmet need for contraception, and fulfilling these needs would likely prevent almost 11,000 maternal deaths per year.
Additionally, the Guttmacher Institute estimates that every dollar spent on contraceptive services beyond the current level would reduce the cost of pregnancy-related and newborn care by three do
Do we all need to do intense cause prio thinking?
Some off the cuff thoughts:
Currently I’m working on doing cause prio, finding my key uncertainties, trying to figure out what the most important problem is and how I can help solve it. Every time I feel I’m getting somewhere in my thinking I come up with 10 new things to consider. Although I enjoy this as an exercise it does take up a lot of time and its hard to know how “worth it” doing this is. I‘m now wondering were a good stopping point is / what proportion of time is useful to spend on thinking about these types of questions (especially if you’re unlikely to contribute to research). Part of me thinks that I should just defer to a few people who seem to know what they’re talking about then from there start putting my skills to use rather than spending a bunch of time philosphising about who matters and whether I’m a negative utilitarian. Does anyone have any (strong) thoughts about these two approaches and if it is helpful/necessary for everyone within EA to spend significant amounts of time doing cause prio work?
My quick boring take is that you should do roughly whatever level of cause prio you enjoy doing / remain curious about / etc. I’d roughly guess that at a community level this will lead to a healthy balance in the community of deferring vs. developing inside views / critiquing / etc. (I do think it’s quite important that at least a significant fraction spend a bunch of time on cause prio to avoid deferral cascades and allow more perspectives to be heard) and plus it generally seems good for people to do whatever they enjoy. :)
Thanks for writing this up! I'm also in the midst of Working Things Out and a lot of what you've said hits home. My bottom line here is something like: I completely agree that there comes a point in most people's decisions about their lives and what to prioritise, where even though they've done all the homework and counted all the utils on each side, they mostly make the final decision based on intuition - because you ultimately can't prove most of this stuff for certain. One thing that could help you structure your cause prio is by focusing more on a key decision that it has to help you decide on, and using your sureness about that decision as a barometer for when you've caused enough prios.
> On "I come up with 10 new things to consider" - you're right that it feels like battling an intellectual hydra of crucial considerations sometimes. Have you got the sense so far that, of the 10 new things to consider, there's at least one or two that could substantially reshape your opinion? For me, even when that's not the case, having a more detailed picture can still be really good. This seems especially important for situations/roles where you'll probably end up communicating about EA to people with less context than you.
> On when to stop: Cause prio thinking and building models of different fields of research / work is definitely something you could spend literally forever on. I roughly think that this wave of EAs are stopping just a bit too early, and are jumping into trying to do useful work too quickly. I elaborate more in the next bit.
> Against lots of deferring: An argument here that motivates me is that in most EA/LTist roles you'll want to go into, it seems like time spent investing in your cause prio saves time. Specifically, it's likely to save time that your colleagues would otherwise have to spend giving you context, explaining how they orient towards the problem, etc. The more you've nailed what your view is, the better you can make (increasingly) autonomous decisions about how the projects you work on should look, etc. I think that this applies in basically any field of EA work: knowing in great detail why you care about a given cause area helps you identify which empirical facts about the world matter to your aims. This I think helps you a lot with strategy and design decisions. It also means that your team benefits more from having you on it - because your perspective is likely to be distinct in useful ways from other people's!
(I'm quite uncertain about the above and I think this sort of thing differs a lot between individuals)