Comments
A couple relevant pieces: In this talk, Tyler Cowen talks about how impartial utilitarianism makes sense today since we can impact humans far from ourselves (in both time and space), but how deontology may have been more sensible in the distant past.
In this talk, Devin Kalish argues that utilitarianism is the correct moral theory on the basis of its historical track record. He argues that utilitarianism correctly "predicted" now widely recognized ethical positions (women's rights, anti-slavery, etc).
So I think it's interesting to ask, if GiveWell was around 200 years ago, what would they have recommended, and in hindsight, would that have been the correct cause to advocate for.
One common criticism of EA is that it focuses too much on incremental rather than Systemic Change. We might worry that in 1800, GiveWell would have advocated for better farming practices, but not for abolition, though in retrospect, the latter seems to have been more important.
This is more or less the point Patrick Collison makes here when he says: "It's hard to me to see how writing a treatise on human nature would score really highly in an EA framework, and yet, ex-post, that looks like a really valuable thing for a human to do. And similarly, when we look at things that in hindsight seem like very good things to have happened, it's unclear to me how an EA intuition would have caused someone to do so"
Overall, I don't think this is a super damning criticism. The world has changed. It's more legible, and more subject to utilitarian calculus.
But still, it's an interesting quesiton.
Interesting question - I'm curious what makes you ask?
This looks super interesting to me. We can, in a sense, simulate a longer history of Effective Altruism and see what patterns there are.
Another angle (/ piece of the puzzle) to compare different decision-making processes