To add to the 1st bullet, in this 2013 Q&A with Holden he talked about how GiveWell focused on "proven" interventions like bednets over "speculative" ones like biomedical research because they were easier to evaluate ("easier" being relative, even bednets were pretty hard); even back then he was saying the speculative interventions were better and that the partnership with Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz that created GiveWell Labs (which turned into OP/CG) enabled this pivot. 

a few months ago we had in this very forum a discussion, if memory serves, of the terrible philanthropic choices of MacKenzie Scott.

I couldn't find this discussion, would you mind me pointing to it? 

You're right that it isn't a WBE. Also, incentives:

To be fair, we’re not unsympathetic to why Eon used the language they did. Their careful blog post on ‘How the Eon Team Produced a Virtual Embodied Fly’ would likely have only been read by a few hundred neuroscientists, while “We’ve uploaded a fruit fly” reached millions. Startup survival requires investment, funding follows excitement, and excitement follows headlines - not careful caveats. This bold approach may even feel obligatory when an organisation’s stated mission is “solving brain emulation as an engineering sprint, not a decades-long research program.”

Not really a useful comment, just thought of qntm's short horror story Lena when I saw your post title. Hopefully we avoid this, thanks for working on this problem :)

This article is about the standard test brain image. For the original human, see Miguel Acevedo.

MMAcevedo (Mnemonic Map/Acevedo), also known as Miguel, is the earliest executable image of a human brain. It is a snapshot of the living brain of neurology graduate Miguel Acevedo Álvarez (2010–2073), taken by researchers at the Uplift Laboratory at the University of New Mexico on August 1, 2031. Though it was not the first successful snapshot taken of the living state of a human brain, it was the first to be captured with sufficient fidelity that it could be run in simulation on computer hardware without succumbing to cascading errors and rapidly crashing. ...

The successful creation of MMAcevedo was hailed as a breakthrough achievement in neuroscience, with the Uplift researchers receiving numerous accolades and Acevedo himself briefly becoming an acclaimed celebrity. Acevedo and MMAcevedo were jointly recognised as Time's "Persons of the Year" at the end of 2031. The breakthrough was also met with severe opposition from human rights groups.

Between 2031 and 2049, MMAcevedo was duplicated more than 80 times, so that it could be distributed to other research organisations. Each duplicate was made with the express permission of Acevedo himself or, from 2043 onwards, the permission of a legal organisation he founded to manage the rights to his image. Usage of MMAcevedo diminished in the mid-2040s as more standard brain images were produced, these from other subjects who were more lenient with their distribution rights and/or who had been scanned involuntarily. 

In 2049 it became known that MMAcevedo was being widely shared and experimented upon without Acevedo's permission. Acevedo's attempts to curtail this proliferation had the opposite of the intended effect. A series of landmark U.S. court decisions found that Acevedo did not have the right to control how his brain image was used, with the result that MMAcevedo is now by far the most widely distributed, frequently copied, and closely analysed human brain image.

Acevedo died from coronary heart failure in 2073 at the age of 62. It is estimated that copies of MMAcevedo have lived a combined total of more than 152,000,000,000 subjective years in emulation. If illicit, modified copies of MMAcevedo are counted, this figure increases by an order of magnitude.

MMAcevedo is considered by some to be the "first immortal", and by others to be a profound warning of the horrors of immortality.

Extended anecdote from My Willing Complicity In "Human Rights Abuse", by a former doctor (GP) working at a Qatari visa center in India to process "the enormous number of would-be Indian laborers who wished to take up jobs there":

Another man comes to mind (it is not a coincidence that the majority of applicants were men). He was a would-be returnee - he had completed a several year tour of duty in Qatar itself, for as long as his visa allowed, and then returned because he was forced to, immediately seeking reassessment so he could head right back. He had worked as a truck driver, and now wanted to become a personal chauffeur instead.

He had been away for several years and had not returned a moment before he was compelled to. He had family: a wife and a young son, as well as elderly parents. All of them relied on him as their primary breadwinner. I asked him if he missed them. Of course he did. But love would not put food on the table. Love would not put his son into a decent school and ensure that he picked up the educational qualifications that would break the cycle. Love would not ensure his elderly and increasingly frail parents would get beyond-basic medical care and not have to till marginal soil at the tiny plot of land they farmed.

But the labor he did out of love and duty would. He told me that he videocalled them every night, and showed me that he kept a picture of his family on his phone. He had a physical copy close at hand, tucked behind the transparent case. It was bleached by the sun to the point of illegibility and half-covered by what I think was a small-denomination Riyal note.

He said this all in an incredibly matter-of-fact way. I felt my eyes tear up, and I looked away so he wouldn't notice. ... 

I asked him how well the job paid. Well enough to be worth it, he told me. He quoted a figure that was not very far from my then monthly salary of INR 76,000 (about $820 today). Whatever he made there, I noted that I had made about the same while working as an actual doctor in India in earlier jobs. ... He expected a decent bump - personal drivers seemed to be paid slightly better than commercial operators. 

I asked him if he had ever worked similar roles in India. He said he had. He had made a tenth the money, in conditions far worse than what he would face in Qatar. He, like many other people I interviewed, viewed the life you have the luxury of considering inhumane and unpalatable, and deemed it a strict improvement to the status quo. He was eager to be back. He was saddened that his son would continue growing up in his absence, but he was optimistic that the boy would understand why his father did what he had to do. ...

By moving to the Middle East, he was engaged in arbitrage that allowed him to make a salary comparable to the doctor seeing him in India. I look at how much more I make after working in the NHS and see a similar bump. ...

... "exploitation" is a word with a definition, and that definition requires something more than "a transaction that takes place under conditions of inequality." If we define exploitation as taking unfair advantage of vulnerability, we need a story about how the worker is made worse off relative to the alternative - and the workers I spoke with, consistently and across months, told me the opposite story. ... They are adults making difficult tradeoffs under difficult constraints, the same tradeoffs that educated Westerners make constantly but with much less margin for error and no safety net.

I do not recall ever outright rejecting an applicant for a cause that couldn't be fixed, but even the occasional instances where I had to turn them away and ask them to come back after treatment hurt. Both of us - there was often bargaining and disappointment that cut me to the bone. I do not enjoy making people sad, even if my job occasionally demands that of me. I regret making them spend even more of their very limited money and time on followups and significant travel expenses, even if I was duty-bound to do so on occasion. 

Zooming out to the author's main argument:

The argument generally goes: This job involves intense heat, long hours, and low pay relative to Western minimum wages. Therefore, it is inherently exploitative, and anyone taking it must be a victim of coercion or deception.

This completely ignores the economic principle of revealed preferences: the idea that you can tell what a person actually values by observing what they choose to do under constraint. Western pundits sit in climate-controlled pods and declare that nobody should ever have to work in forty-degree heat for $300 a month. But for someone whose alternative is working in forty-degree heat in Bihar for $30 a month with no social safety net, banning Qatari labor practices just destroys their highest expected-value option. ...

The economic case for Gulf migration from South Asia is almost embarrassingly strong when you actually look at it. India received roughly $120 billion in remittances in 2023, making it the world's largest recipient, with Gulf states still accounting for a very large share, though the RBI's own survey data show that advanced economies now contribute more than half of India's remittances. For certain origin states - Kerala being the clearest case, alongside Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu - remittance income is not a rounding error in household economics; it is the household economy. The man sending money home from Doha is participating in a system that has done more for South Asian poverty alleviation than most bilateral aid programs combined.

It's a bummer that this situation is hard to improve affordability-, accessibility-, and safety-wise. CE-incubated Rahi Impact tried, but after deeper and frankly disheartening-to-read investigation concluded this was neither tractable nor cost-effective for them due to inability to source jobs at scale from Gulf employers due to their commitment to ethical recruitment disadvantaging them -- folks are so desperate to work in the Gulf that the resulting huge labor oversupply gives Gulf employers significant leverage which they use to monetise visas by demanding bribes from recruiting agents for access to job slots, which then get passed on to workers as exorbitant fees or garnished pay (worth 2.5 years of wages in their home country, a lot of this paid upfront). The recruiters also screw over the workers often enough to drive a ~30% migration failure rate, here's a real case study from Rahi's investigation:

Case Study: Fraudulent Practices in Migration  Asif (name changed), a 34-year-old from India, faced mounting debts that forced him to seek work abroad. In March 2023, he left behind his small garment shop, lured by the promise of higher wages and stable employment in the Gulf. However, his journey soon turned into a costly ordeal. Through a recommendation from his in-laws, Asif found an agent in a nearby city who charged $1,440 for a job as a helper in the GCC. Trusting both the recommendation and the apparent seniority of the agent, Asif paid the amount and traveled to Mumbai to complete the required migration steps. Once there, he was stranded—his agent disappeared, and phone calls went unanswered. Desperate to recover his losses, Asif sought advice from a family friend, who recommended a different agent. Acting on this recommendation, he paid $920 for a two-month visitor visa to Dubai, with the promise that it would be converted into a work visa. In Dubai, he was put to work in a laundry, packing clothes, but he faced severe exploitation. Although promised $290 per month, he received only $220 and worked 19-hour shifts without overtime pay. Since he was on a visitor visa, he had no legal recourse. When Asif could no longer endure the conditions, he paid for his own return ticket home. Unfortunately, at the airport he discovered he had overstayed his visa by 20 days and incurred a $290 fine.  In total, Asif believes he wasted two years and suffered a financial loss of over $2,300. Like many, Asif fell victim to false promises and desperation. Yet, with no opportunities at home and debts still unpaid, he remains willing to take the risk again—highlighting the dire reality for many low-skilled workers in South Asia.

Asif will still try it again, damn. 

As a silver lining, Rahi's cofounders list many other potential impactful solutions to be trialed for improving Gulf migration from South Asia for the >1.2 million workers who make the journey every year. But I think the ex-GP's point stands that taking away the option to work in the Gulf, exploitation and fraud and elevated death risk included, is a non-solution, it would make things even worse than not doing anything at all. 

It does seem like some of the "serious" GHD discussion is moving off the forum, e.g. later today I'm attending this online workshop (more info) that touches on your 3rd bullet. This seems part of the wider trend of decision-influencing discussion becoming internalised due to the professionalisation of EA GHD, which probably absorbed some of the best early commenters into these orgs. Holden's 2014 writeup on the challenges of transparency seems loosely related if not exactly the same. 

Maybe a fortnightly poll on each of those X vs Y topics? Or more cross-posting from GHD substacks like yours, Hannah Ritchie's, David Nash's, Lant Pritchett's etc.

James' post did provide an example: the Maternal Health Initiative shut down due to their pilot results not yielding the 10% shift in contraceptive uptake their CEA informed them to aim for. Maybe this wasn't what you were looking for?

AI race accelerant -> shorter timelines -> riskier for everyone (not just EA) was my read.

I think it's more nuanced than just "the EA movement neglects systemic change", since even as far back as 2015 Rob Wiblin at 80K could list all these systemic change initiatives: 

Here are some people who identify as effective altruists working on systemic change:

• Most recent Open Philanthropy research and grants, on immigration reform, criminal justice reform, macroeconomics, and international development, are clearly focussed on huge structural changes of various kinds.
• The OpenBorders.info website collates research on and promotes the option of dramatic increases in migration from poor to rich countries.
• A new startup called EA Policy, recommended for financial support by my colleagues at EA Ventures, is testing the impact of making submissions to open policy forums held by the US Government during this summer.
• Our colleagues at the Global Priorities Project research what should be the most important reform priorities for governments, and how they can improve cost-benefit and decision-making processes.
• One of GiveWell’s main goals from the beginning, perhaps it’s primary goal, has been to change the cultural norms within the nonprofit sector, and the standards by which they are judged by donors. They wanted to make it necessary for charities to be transparent with donors about their successes and failures, and run projects that actually helped recipients. They have already significantly changed the conversation around charitable giving.
• Giving What We Can representatives have met with people in the UK government about options for improving aid effectiveness. One of its first and most popular content page debunks myths people cite when opposing development aid. One of the first things I wrote when employed by Giving What We Can was on the appropriate use of discounts rates by governments delivering health services. Until recently one Giving What We Can member, who we know well, was working at the UK’s aid agency DfID.
• Some 80,000 Hours alumni, most of whom unfortunately would rather remain anonymous, are going into politics, think-tanks, setting up a labour mobility organisations or businesses that facilitate remittance flows to the developing world.
• Several organisations focussed on existential risk (FHI, CSER and FLI jump to mind) take a big interest in government policies, especially those around the regulation of new technologies, or institutions that can improve inter-state cooperation and prevent conflict.
• 80,000 Hours alumni and effective altruist charities work on or donate to lobbying efforts to improve animal welfare regulation, such as Humane Society US-FARM. Other activists are working for dramatic society-wide changes in how society views the moral importance of non-human animals.

Rob's guesses at how this perception that EA neglects systemic change might've formed:

• ‘earning to give’ was one of our most media friendly and viral ideas, and has dominated coverage of 80,000 Hours and effective altruism among the general public, to our growing consternation. Earning to give is usually perceived as anti-systemic change.
  In fact, someone who ‘earned to give’ in order to pay the salary of someone else working for systemic change is working for systemic change themselves. In that sense ‘earning to give’ is simply neutral on the systemic vs non-systemic change issue. Communist revolutionary Friedrich Engels is a classic example of this approach, though my guess is he personally did more harm than good.
  I would also argue though that creating a social expectation that to be decent people, the rich should give away a large fraction of their wealth to others, is itself a form of systemic change.
• Effective altruists are usually not radicals or revolutionaries, as is apparent from my list above. My attitude, looking at history, is that sudden dramatic changes in society usually lead to worse outcomes than gradual evolutionary improvements. I am keen to tinker with government or economic systems to make them work better, but would only rarely want to throw them out and rebuild from scratch. I personally favour maintaining and improving mostly market-driven economies, though some of my friends and colleagues hope we can one day do much better. Regardless, this temperament for ‘crossing the river by feeling the stones’ is widespread among effective altruists, and in my view that’s a great thing that can help us avoid the mistakes of extremists through history. The system could be a lot better, but one only need look at history to see that it could also be much worse.
  However, even this remains only an empirically founded belief – if I find evidence that revolutionary change has been better than I thought, I will reconsider working for revolutionary changes.
• Effective altruists prefer to pursue systemic changes that are more likely to be achieved, all else equal. Sometimes we view existing attempts at systemic change as more symbolic or idealistic than realistic, and so push back against them. For example I wrote a post years ago about why it’s not a good use of time to work on US gun control. Of course this is nothing to do with systemic change specifically: we frequently also push back against non-systemic approaches that we don’t expect to help others very much. And I try to apply my pragmatism to the systemic changes that in my heart I would love to love: enthusiastic as I am about opening borders, it may be an impossible ask in the current political climate.
• We have been taking on the enormous problem of ‘how to help others do the most good’ and had to start somewhere. The natural place for us, GiveWell and other research groups to ‘cut our teeth’ was by looking at the cause areas and approaches where the empirical evidence was strongest, such as the health improvement from anti-malarial bednets, or determining in which careers people could best ‘earn to give’.
  Having learned from that research experience we are in a better position to evaluate approaches to systemic change, which are usually less transparent or experimental, and compare them to non-systemic options. This is very clear from the case of the Open Philanthropy, which is branching out from GiveWell and is more open to high-risk and ‘unproven’ approaches like political advocacy than GiveWell itself.

This is a 10+ year old snapshot of the EA movement's efforts w.r.t. systemic change. I wouldn't be surprised if there's been much more since, e.g. some ACX grantees, some funders' funds, etc. I do think there's something to the critique, but I'd like to understand it better.

Possibly complementary: Linch's Some unfun lessons I learned as a junior grantmaker.