Am I working on the wrong problem?

A personal update, and some thoughts about effective altruism and our current politics

Hey folks,

I haven’t posted in a while, mainly because I’ve been working on a small animal welfare startup project. I’ll be sharing more in the coming weeks, but for now, let’s just say that the shrimp welfare meme will live on…

Today, though, I wanted to discuss a kind of fleeting-but-recurring discouragement I’ve experienced while working on this project, particularly because of the political era we’re living in. Now, to be clear, I am excited about this project, and think it is definitely worthwhile. But every once in a while I check the news, see all the terrible things happening, and wonder: am I working on the wrong problem? Should I be working on… <shudder> politics?

Now, my conclusion (to spoil the story) is that no, I am perfectly happy working on animal welfare. But it got me thinking about a well-known objection to the effective altruism movement — a movement that includes much animal welfare work — that it unjustifiably neglects politics. And I must say, living through our current political moment, this objection feels to me more pressing than ever.

What is effective altruism?

The effective altruism movement is a social movement concerned with doing good.

Err, wait, doesn’t everyone care about doing good? 😅 Sorry, let me fix that:

The effective altruism movement is a social movement concerned with doing good (autistically).

The idea is to use “evidence and reason” to identify and support the most effective charities. That may seem obvious — who needs this? — but in the real world, it is more common for people to donate their money based on emotional whims than careful reasoning about how to do the most good.

The politics objection to effective altruism

Most people don’t object to the idea that we should try to do some good using “evidence and reason”, but they might disagree about what this means in practice. Effective altruists vary in their individual political beliefs, but as a broad movement, they have settled on an incrementalist, liberal, politically milquetoast approach. Naturally, this has led to leftist critique. Here is the philosopher Brian Leiter:

…most human misery has systemic causes, which charity never addresses, but which political change can address; ergo, all money and effort should go towards systemic and political reform

Let’s start with where the argument goes wrong. While I agree that we should focus on systemic change, it is not true that charity never addresses systemic change. When The Humane League gets McDonald’s to adopt cage-free eggs across their thousands of stores, this is a “systemic change” by any meaningful sense of that term. Hence I am unperturbed in my work on animal welfare: I do think we ought to focus on systemic change, and I think the most effective animal welfare charities are doing so.

That being said, I think the argument is compelling when not overstated. So here’s how I would reframe the argument: Socio-political systems are a “master” cause area: when you have a well-functioning socio-political system, it makes it easier to solve every other problem you have. Ergo, making our socio-political systems better should be a high priority cause area.

Yet, the effective altruism movement pays little attention to politics. Here is the 80,000 hours ranking of the 9 most pressing world problems (by category):

1. AI

2. AI

3. Pandemics

4. AI

5. Great power conflict

6. Factory farming

7. Wild animal suffering

8. Global health

9. Climate change

live look inside EA headquarters

Everything is political to some extent, but the point is, none of these cause areas address how, for example, we ended up with Donald Trump as president. And now that we do have Donald Trump as president, progress on basically every aforementioned cause area is worse off:

• Democratic norms and the rule of law are being undermined in a pivotal moment of AI development

• An anti-vax conspiracy theorist heads the HHS while the Trump administration cuts university research funding

• Global health and well-being is a total disaster, be it from the cuts to foreign aid, anti-immigration policy, tariffs on poor countries, or the famine in Gaza

• Red states gleefully ban factory-farmed meat alternatives, while in blue states the Trump administration is doing its best to mandate animal torture

• Renewable energy projects are being cancelled, while coal mining regulations are rolled back

So, yeah, not great. 😔

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Politics is important, but it is very unpleasant. One of the reasons I like the current project I’m working on—an app where you can protect animals and our climate with memes—is that it gives you a way to do some good without getting wrapped up in the toxicity of politics. In this day and age, I hope we can all have this kind of outlet.

—Ben

P.S. If you want to test my app, send me a message!