EA - [Cause Exploration Prizes] The importance of Intercausal Impacts by Sebastian Joy

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: [Cause Exploration Prizes] The importance of Intercausal Impacts, published by Sebastian Joy on August 24, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This essay was submitted to Open Philanthropy's Cause Exploration Prizes contest. If you're seeing this in summer 2022, we'll be posting many submissions in a short period. If you want to stop seeing them so often, apply a filter for the appropriate tag! Defining key cause areas - such as global poverty, animal suffering, and existential risks - is an important element of effective altruism, in part because it has helped effective altruists to identify the most effective organizations and interventions in each area. However, addressing one cause area at a time without considering the ways in which its interventions affect other cause areas - for better or worse - can have a negative impact on the overall effectiveness of EA, a consequence that is often not considered. Invoking an Intercausal Impacts analysis, this article makes a case for establishing food systems transformation/meat reduction as a cause area in its own right. Effective Altruism’s ‘divide-and-improve’ approach Effective Altruism aims to improve the world as effectively and efficiently as possible. To achieve this goal, global problems are usually split up into different cause areas. Each cause area is analysed on the criteria triad of importance, tractability, and neglectedness. Such an analysis is what led to causes such as ‘global poverty’ (improving the economic or health situation of the least affluent), ‘animal suffering’ (reducing non-human suffering) and ‘existential risks’ (increasing the chances of survival for future generations) becoming prominent focus areas of EA. And the list of cause areas is growing. This ‘divide-and-conquer’ or rather ‘divide-and-improve’ approach has proven very useful so far in EA thinking and theorising, and has led to the establishment of several meta-charities for each of the three cause areas highlighted above. The goal of these meta-charities is to research, analyse and promote those organisations and interventions that are best suited to solve the specific problems within their cause area. While the meta-charity ‘GiveWell’ looks into the most effective interventions to help the global poor, ‘Animal Charity Evaluators’ tries to identify the most useful interventions to reduce animal suffering, and the ‘Centre for the Study of Existential Risk’ aims at reducing the risk of humanity becoming extinct. Here is a simple overview of this process in three steps: Drawbacks of the divide-and-improve approach While this approach has many benefits and has helped improve the state of the world tremendously, it comes with crucial and so far often overlooked drawbacks. There are two ways this approach might actually work against EA’s overall goal of creating the most good in the world - both of which involve what I call ‘Intercausal Impacts’, i.e. the overall impact of a given organisation or intervention not only on its respective primary cause area but on all cause areas aggregated. Overrating: Interventions (and organisations) that are regarded as very efficient in one cause area might have negative spill-over effects and actually do damage in other cause areas. Thus, their overall impact might be significantly less positive (and in some cases even net negative) than is immediately apparent. Ignoring negative spill-over effects on other cause areas implies an overrating of the intervention or organisation in question. Underrating: Interventions (and organisations) that have a positive impact on various causes but are not amongst the most effective in any particular cause area will receive little or no attention and support although their overall cost-effectiveness across cause areas might be superior. Ignoring positive spill-ov...