Thread by @bramcohen

There are a few things different types of things which the Effective Altruism movement is trying to do which are very ill-served by being lumped into the same bucket and one whole side of things is being approached all wrong. Let me explain: /1

The most basic things EA is trying to improve are poverty and human health. Here it really shines: returns on investment can be calculated, metrics like quality adjusted life-years can be easily justified, apples-to-apples investment decisions can be made /2

And for these causes there is no big political movement trying to stop you. Almost everybody agrees that prosperity and health are great things. Bringing rigor to the process of charity has been clearly beneficial for the world. But not everything fits into this bucket /3

The first big problem comes from causes where it's very difficult to calculate ROI, such as existential threats and basic science. Here the calculations wind up looking like infinity times zero, with devotees arguing that the output should be infinity and skeptics saying zero /4

Discussions of EA are perennially overrun by this stupid unproductive argument. What should happen is that hard-to-measure causes get their own separate funding and can argue about allocation amongst themselves. /5

The balance between the two should stop being revisited continually. Obviously allocation within hard to measure causes is difficult and I believe that the people campaigning for their own pet cause are well-meaning, but this wheel spinning doesn't help anybody /6

Segregating the two into different groups may sound harsh but is likely the simplest and most expedient way of fixing the problem and would be better for everything. Common activities are fine but they should a fraction of events unlike the status quo of everything /7

An even bigger problem for EA is that its approach to a large fraction of causes, let's call them 'activist causes' are all wrong. These are causes where the problems and solutions are known, and often free or even profitable, but there's a political problem /8

Many if not the bulk of EA causes are activist causes: environmentalism, animal welfare, human rights (including migration and criminal justice), and peace are good examples. These causes need people more than money /9

And they need a good understanding of what the political problem is, why it persists, and a strategy which has a hope of fixing it before throwing money at the problem has any hope of working at all /10

Segregating activist causes out might help a bit with getting them out of the ROI mindset, but first there needs to be broad understanding that the current approaches to them are going about it all wrong /11

Activism requires the fine arts of writing bipartisan legislation and changing public opinion, and even before that sociopolitical analysis of what's going on and why /12

Which is not to say that EA has nothing to contribute to these causes. Far from it, these are causes which are rife with the traditional charity pathology of money being thrown down a hole. But it's hard to do better and one should start with acknowledging that fact /13

There are of course health causes which have an activist component, and some activist causes which people have shown real ROI interventions on, and I don't wish to trivialize the problems with the former or diminish the good work on the latter /14

But there are areas of large possible improvement within the EA movement and I'm putting in my two cents in the hopes that it can help in the future. /15

Finally, with segregating causes I don't wish to kick vegans out of events or even stop preparing food for them (it's very convenient to me as a lactose intolerant person) but there should be more emphasis on pairing them with people whose cause is delicious food /fin