Effective Altruism in practice

 6.5k words (~17 minutes)

 

I've written about key ideas in Effective Altruism before. But that was the theory. How did EA actually come to exist, and what does it look like in practice?

 

... turns out it looks like a stylised light bulb with a heart.

 

Summary

• The ideas underpinning EA came from many sources, including:

  • late-1900s analytic moral philosophers like Peter Singer and Derek Parfit;
  • futurist/transhumanist thinkers like Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowsky focusing on risks from future technologies;
  • a few people working on evaluating charity effectiveness;
  • efforts starting around 2010 by a few Oxford philosophers including William MacAskill and Toby Ord that, sometimes unwittingly, gave structure and a name to a diverse cluster of ideas about how to maximise your positive impact.

• Though EA is framed around the question of "what does the most good (according to an analytic and often quantiative framework based on impartial welfare-oriented ethics)?" rather than any particular answer to that question, in practice much (but not all!) EA efforts focus on one of the following, due to many people deciding that it's a particularly pressing and (outside EA) neglected problem:

  • reducing the risk of civilisation-wide catastrophe, especially from emerging technologies like advanced AI and biotechnology;
  • health and development in poor countries; and
  • animal welfare.
  • There is also a lot of work at the meta-level, including on figuring out how people can have impactful careers, and trying to direct effort towards the above problems.

• The funding for most EA-related projects and EA-endorsed charities comes from a combination of:

  • many individual small donors, in particular:

    • people who have taken the Giving What We Can pledge and therefore donate >10% of their salary to highly effective charities;
    • people who explicitly pursue "earning-to-give" (getting a high-paying job in order to donate most of the proceeds to charities);

  • several foundations that derive their wealth from billionaires, including most prominently:

    • Open Philanthropy, mostly funded by Dustin Moskovitz who made his wealth from being a Facebook co-founder; and
    • FTX Foundation, funded by Sam Bankman-Fried and several other early employees at the crypto exchange FTX.

• There is no monolithic EA organisation (though the Centre for Effective Altruism organises some common things like the EA Global conferences), but rather a large collection of organisations that mainly share:

  • a commitment to maximising their positive impact on the world;
  • a generally rigorous and quantitative approach to doing so; and
  • some link to the cluster of people and organisations in Oxford that first named the idea of Effective Altruism.
  • There are also many charities that have no direct relation to the EA movement, but were identified by charity evaluators like GiveWell as extremely effective, and have thus been extensively funded.

• EA is very good at attracting talented people, especially ambitious young people at top universities.

• EA culture leans intellectual and open, and has a high emphasis on "epistemic rigour", i.e. being very careful about trying to figure out what is true, acknowledging and reasoning about uncertainties, etc.

• Some "axes" within EA include:

  • "long-termists" who focus on possible grand futures of humanity and the existential risks that stand between us and those grand futures, and "near-termists" who work on clearer and more established things like global poverty and animal welfare;
  • a bunch of people and ideas all about frugality and efficient use of money, and another bunch of people and ideas about using the available funding to unblock opportunities for major impact; and
  • a historical tendency to be very good at attracting philosophy/research-type people who like wrestling with difficult abstract questions, versus a growing need to find entrepreneurial, operations, and policy people to actually do things in the real world.

The philosophers

In the beginning (i.e. circa the 1970s, when time is widely known to have begun), there were a bunch of philosophers doing interesting work. One of them was Peter Singer. Peter Singer proposed questions like this (paraphrasing, not quoting, and updated with recent numbers):

Imagine you're wearing a $5000 suit and you walk past a child drowning in a lake. Do you jump into the lake and save the child, even though it ruins your suit?

If you answered yes to the above, then consider this: it is possible to save a child's life in the developing world for $5000; what justification do you have for spending that money on the suit rather than saving the life?

The only difference between the two scenarios seems to be distance to the dying child (and method of death and etc. but ssshh); is that distance really morally significant?

(He is also known for arguing in favour of animal rights and abortion rights.)

Derek Parfit is another. He is particularly famous for the book Reasons and Persons, in which he asks questions (paraphrasing again) like this:

Is a moral harm done if you cause fewer people to exist in the future than otherwise might have? How should we reason about our responsibilities to future generations and non-existing people more generally?

Does there exist a number of people living mediocre (but still positive) lives such that this world is better than some smaller number of people living very good lives?

(He also talks about problems in the philosophy of personal identity, and the contradictions in moral philosophies based on self-interest.)

The transhumanists

Then, largely separately and around the 1990s, there came the transhumanists ("transhumanism" is a wide-reaching umbrella term for humanist thinking about radical future technological change). Perhaps the most notable are Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Nick Bostrom thought long and hard about many wacky-seeming things with potentially cosmic consequences. He popularised the simulation hypothesis (the idea that we might all be living in a computer simulation). He argues against death (something I strongly agree with). He did lots of work on anthropic reasoning, which is about the question of how we should update information we get about the state of the world when taking into account that we wouldn't exist unless the state of the world allowed it. This leads to some thought experiments that I'd classify as infohazards because of their tendency to spark an unending discussion whenever they're described. Conveniently, he also coined the term "infohazard".

Most crucially for EA, though, Bostrom has worked on understanding existential risks, which are events that might destroy humanity or permanently and drastically reduce the capacity of humanity to achieve good outcomes in the future. In particular, he has worked on risks from advanced AI, which he boosted to popularity with the 2014 book Superintelligence.

Bostrom's style of argument is like a dry protein bar, leaning toward straightforward extrapolation of conclusions from premises, especially if the conclusions seem crazy but the premises seem self-evident. Sometimes, though, he does apply some literary flair to make an important point, and also occasionally writes poetry.

Eliezer Yudkowsky wanted to create a smarter-than-human AI as fast as possible, until he realised this might be a Bad Idea and said "oops" and switched to the problem of making sure any powerful AIs we create don't destroy human civilisation. He founded the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) to find out the answer.

Yudkowsky also wrote a massive series of blog posts to try to teach people about how to reason well (for example, he covers a lot of ground from the cognitive biases literature), and then went on to try to convey the same lessons in what become the most popular work of Harry Potter fanfiction of all time. His writing and argument style tends toward flowing narratives that are usually both very readable and verbose (though quite hit-or-miss in whether you like it).

He has Opinions (note the capital). He is extremely pessimistic about the chances of solving the AI alignment problem.

Yudkowsky is affiliated much more strongly with the loose "Rationalist community" than with EA. This is a collection of online blogs that was sparked by Yudkowsky's writing, and later in particular also that of Scott Alexander, who has become internet-famous for his own reasons too. The central forum is LessWrong. Both EA and Rationalism involve lots of discussion about far-ranging abstract ideas that (for a certain type of person) are hard to resist; one blogger says "[t]he experience of reading LessWrong for the first time was brain crack" and goes on to propose that EA ideas are best-spread by nerd-sniping (i.e. telling people about ideas they find so interesting that they literally can't help but think about them). Both EA and the Rationalists put an incredible amount of effort and weight on trying to reason well, avoid biases and fallacies, and being careful (and often quantitative) about uncertainties. However, EA focuses more on applying those things to do good in the real world to real people, while the Rationalist vibe is sometimes one of indulging in theorising and practising good thinking for their own sake. (This is not necessarily a criticism - I had fun discussing Lisp syntax in the comments section of the LessWrong version of my review of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, even though arguing about parentheses isn't exactly going to save the world (or is it ... ?)). EA tends to also have a more explicit orientation towards seeking influence.

(I should also note that on the specific topic of AI risk, the Rationalist community is extremely impact-oriented, likely due to founder effects - or perhaps because AI risk is the EA cause area that is most full of juicy technical puzzles and philosophical confusions.)

More philosophers & EA gets a name

Brian Christian's The Alignment Problem mentions in chapter 9 some funny details about the sequence of events that lead to the first few EA-by-name organisations. In 2009, then-Oxford-philosophy-student Will MacAskill had an argument about vegetarianism while in a broom closet. Unlike most arguments about vegetarianism, and echoing the vibe of much future EA thinking, this one was on the meta-level; the debate was not whether factory farming is bad, but how we should deal with the moral uncertainty around whether or not factory farming is ethical. MacAskill eventually started talking with Toby Ord (though in a graveyard rather than a broom closet), another philosophy student interested in questions around moral uncertainty.

Together with one other person, the two of them wrote a book on moral uncertainty. MacAskill and a philosophy-and-physics student called Benjamin Todd founded an organisation called 80 000 Hours to try to figure out how people can choose careers to have the greatest positive impact on the world. Toby Ord founded an organisation called Giving What We Can (GWWC) that encourages people to donate 10% of their salary to exceptionally effective charities. GWWC estimates its roughly 8000 members have donated $277mn, and are likely to donate almost $3bn over their lifetimes.

As an umbrella organisation for both of these, they created the Centre for Effective Altruism. Originally the "Effective Altruism" part was intended purely as a descriptive part of the organisation's name, but at some point started to stand more broadly for the general space of effectively altruistic things that at some point interacted with ideas from the original Oxford cluster.

Later, MacAskill wrote a book called Doing Good Better summarising ideas about why charity effectiveness is important and counterintuitive. Ord in turn wrote The Precipice that summarises ideas about how mitigating existential risks to human civilisation is likely a key moral priority; after all, it would be bad if we all died.

Charity evaluators and billionaires

Independently from (and before) anything happening in Oxford broom closets, starting in 2006 hedge fund managers Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld started thinking seriously about which charities to donate to. Upon discovering that this is a surprisingly hard problem, they started GiveWell, an organisation focused on finding exceptionally effective charities. They ended up concentrating on global health (their list includes malaria prevention, vitamin supplementation, and cash transfers, all in developing countries).

After a few years of GiveWell existing, they were put in touch with Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna. At the time, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz was the world's youngest self-made billionaire, and with his partner Cari Tuna had started a philanthropic organisation called Good Ventures in 2011.

What followed was a cinematic failure of prioritisation, as recounted by Holden Karnofsky himself in this interview. The GiveWell founders decided that "[meeting the billionaires] just doesn't seem very high priority", and thought that "[n]ext time someone's in California we should definitely take this meeting, but [...] this isn't the kind of thing we would rush for [...]". However, Karnofsky realised this meeting was an excellent excuse to go on a date with a Californian he fancied (and later married), and as a result ended up making the trip sooner rather than later.

Moskovitz and Tuna turned out to have very simplistic preferences for charitable giving: they just wanted to do the most good possible. This was an excellent fit with GiveWell's philosophy, and soon Good Ventures partnered with GiveWell in what would later become Open Philanthropy (of which Karnofsky would become co-CEO). Open Philanthropy is a key funder of EA projects, though they fund unrelated things as well (though always through a very EA lens of trying to rigorously and quantitatively maximise impact) . They list all their grants here.

While studying physics at MIT, Sam Bankman-Fried (or "SBF"), already deeply interested in consequentialist moral philosophy, attended a talk by Will MacAskill on EA ideas. After stints at trading companies and the Centre for Effective Altruism, he founded the crypto-focused trading companies Alameda Research and then FTX, and ended up becoming the richest under-30 person in the world. (Though then the value of FTX fell in the crypto crash, and he recently turned 30 to boot.)

EDIT: In November 2022, both FTX and Alameda Research collapsed in a matter of days, and it became clear that FTX had committed major and flagrant financial fraud by transferring customer funds to Alameda, which Alameda then speculated with, and seems to have lost to the tune of billions of dollars. SBF is facing criminal charges. FTX and SBF have been condemned in harsh terms by those running many EA orgs and in countless EA Forum posts. Obviously, FTX and SBF have now very clearly become examples of what NOT to do. All of the following seem true: (a) our prior should be that people committing illegal and immoral actions that lead to extreme wealth and prestige for themselves are most likely acting mostly for the standard boring selfishly-evil reasons, (b) SBF probably had an easier time justifying his crimes because of the story that he could tell himself about doing good for the world, (c) publicly associating himself with EA, and receiving positive attention from EA organisations, helped make SBF appear moral and trustworthy, (d) there existed evidence and signals (in particular reports from Alameda's early days about cut-throat behaviour from SBF) that provided evidence of SBF's character before the FTX collapse, and (e) it is generally harder than it seems in hindsight to be right about whether a business is fraudulent (consider that coutless venture capitalists poured billions into FTX, and presumably had incentive to figure out if the entire thing was a scam). More information will come to light with time, and there are definitely lessons to be learned. Apart from this paragraph, I have not changed any part of this post.

SBF often emphasises that you're more likely to achieve outlier success in business if your goal is to donate the money effectively. There's little personal gain in going from $100M to $10B, so a selfish businessperson is likely to optimise something like "probability I earn more than [amount that lets me do whatever the hell I want for the rest of my life]", while a (mathematically-literate) altruistic one is far more compelled to simply shoot for the highest expected-value outcomes, even if they're risky. (The exception is the selfish businessperson who really likes competing in the billionaire rankings.)

SBF has also said - and is living proof of - the idea that if your strategy to do good is to earn money to donate, you should probably aim for the risky but high-value bets (e.g. starting a company and becoming a billionaire), rather than going into some high-paying finance job earning a crazy-high but non-astronomical salary. Many people persuaded by EA ideas have done the latter, but SBF contributed more than all of them combined. The maths probably still works out even after accounting for the fact that SBF's route was far more unlikely to work than a finance job (he thought FTX had an 80% chance of failure). This post argues so. Wave, a fintech-for-Africa company with strong EA representation in its founding team and a $1.7B valuation in 2021, is another example of EA business success.

SBF and other senior FTX people (many of who care deeply about EA ideas) launched the FTX Foundation, which in particular contains the Future Fund that has quickly become a key funder of the more future-oriented and speculative parts of EA.

These days, being associated with tech billionaires isn't a ringing endorsement. However, consider a few things. First, the tech billionaires aren't the ones who came up with the ideas or set the agendas. Sports car enthusiast and sci-fi nerd Elon Musk decided that sexy cars and rockets are the most important projects in the world and directed his wealth accordingly; Moskovitz, SBF, & co. were persuaded by abstract arguments and donate their wealth to foundations where the selection of projects is done by people more knowledgeable in that than they are. Second, it seems unusually likely that the major EA donors really are sincere and committed to trying to do the most good; after all, if they wanted to maximise their popularity or acclaim, there are better ways of doing that then funding a loose cluster of people often trying to work specifically on the the least-popular charitable causes (since those are most likely to contain low-hanging fruit). Finally, if some tech billionaires endorsing EA is evidence against EA being a good thing, then no tech billionaires endorsing EA must be evidence in favour of EA being a good thing. However cynical you are about tech billionaires, they're still smart people, so a few of them going "huh, this is the type of thing I want to spend all my wealth on" should be more promising than all of them going "nope I don't buy this".

(If EA has some top tech business people, why doesn't it have some top political people too, or even funders from outside tech? My guess is a combination of factors. Politicians skew old while EAs skew young (partly because EA itself is young). Both EAs and tech people tend to be technically/mathematically/intellectually-inclined (though many areas within EA are specifically about social science or the humanities). Both EAs and tech people tend to care less than average about social norms or prestige, while politicians tend to be selected out of the set of people who are willing to optimise very hard for prestige and popularity. Also, expect some policy-related efforts from EA; many EAs work or aim to work in non-political policy roles, and there have even been some political efforts, though there is much to learn in that field.)

Organisations

In addition to the previously-mentioned CEA, 80 000 Hours, Giving What We Can, GiveWell, Open Philanthropy, and FTX Foundation, organisations with a strong EA influence include (but are not limited to):

• A large number of think-tanks and research institutes, especially ones where people think about the end of the world all day, including

  • Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) at Oxford, which researches big-picture questions about the future of humanity and is run by Nick Bostrom.
  • Future of Life Institute (FLI) in Cambridge (Massachusetts), focusing on global catastrophic risks and existential risks. It was founded by a team including Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn and physicist Max Tegmark. Wikipedia says they are "[n]ot to be confused with Future of Humanity Institute" but to be honest this is a pretty big ask given the name.
  • Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) at Cambridge, also co-founded by Jaan Tallinn.
  • Centre on Long-Term Risk (CLR).
  • Centre on Long-Term Resilience (CLTR) (no, this is not confusing at all, it's all in your head).

• A large number of animal welfare charities, which I won't bother listing, except to point out the meta-level Animal Charity Evaluators.

• A large number of global health charities, including ones that are simply highly recommended (and funded) by GiveWell (in particular Against Malaria Foundation, which routinely tops GiveWell rankings) to ones that also trace their roots solidly to EA.

• Organisations working on AI risk, including:

  • Anthropic, working on interpreting machine learning models (a program led by Chris Olah) and more general empirically-grounded, engineering-based machine learning safety research.
  • Redwood Research, a smaller company also doing empirical machine learning safety work (and running great ML bootcamps on the side).
  • Centre for Human-compatible AI (CHAI), a research institute at UC Berkeley.
  • Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), the original AI safety organisation that was founded in 2000 and hence managed to snap up the enviable domain name "intelligence.org". MIRI's research leans much more mathematical and theory-based than that of most other AI alignment organisations.
  • Conjecture, a new organisation focusing on the work that is most relevant if advanced AI is surprisingly close.
  • (OpenAI and DeepMind, the two leading AI companies, both have safety teams that include people very committed to working on existential risk concerns. However, neither is primarily an AI safety company, and both weight advanced AI risks at a company-level less than the other companies on this list. OpenAI in particular currently sees AI risks more through the near-term lens of making sure AI systems and their benefits are widely accessible to everyone, rather than focusing on making sure AI systems don't doom us all (though I guess that too would be a suitably equitable outcome?).)

• Alvea, a recent vaccine startup, with the eventual goal of enabling faster vaccine roll-out in the next pandemic.

• Charity Entrepreneurship, a charity incubator that has incubated many charities, including for example Healthier Hens (farmed chicken welfare), the Happier Lives Institute (helping policymakers figure out how to increase people's happiness), and Lead Exposure Elimination Project (working to reduce lead exposure in developing countries).

• SparkWave, an incubator for software companies that are solving important problems.

• Effective Thesis, trying to save students from writing pointless theses.

• Founders Pledge, which helps entrepreneurs commit to giving away money when they sell their companies and donate that money effectively (not to be confused with the more famous Giving Pledge). (So far, about $475M has been donated in this way)

• Legal Priorities Project, which looks at the legal aspects of trying to do everything else.

• ALLFED (ALLiance to Feed Earth in Disasters), which aims to be useful in situations where hundreds of millions of people or more are suddenly without food, and which has successfully found the best conceivable name for an organisation that does this.

• Our World in Data (OWID), the world's best provider of data and graphs on important global issues. I'm not quite sure how interrelated they are with EA directly, but their founder posts on the EA Forum about OWID articles on very EA-related ideas, so there's definitely some overlap.

• All-Party Parliamentary Group for Future Generations in the UK government.

• A bunch of organisations focused on getting people interested in the world's biggest problems and teaching them various skills:

  • Atlas Fellowships, a recent initiative for high-schoolers.
  • A collection of Existential Risk Initiatives running, among other things, summer internships where people (mostly undergraduate/postgraduate students) work with mentors on existential risk research: SERI (Stanford), CHERI (Switzerland), CERI (Cambridge), and a newer one at the University of Chicago which I can't yet find a website for, but which will almost certainly not help with the naming situation when it arrives. Thankfully, rumours say there will be soon be a YETI (Yale Existential Threats Initiative), which is a cool and (thank god!) unconfusable name.

Since EA is not a monolithic centralised thing, there is plenty of fuzziness in what counts as an EA organisation, and definitely no official list (and therefore if you're reading this and your org is not on the list, you shouldn't complain - many great orgs were left out). The common features among many of them are:

• Some causal link to stuff that at some point interacted with the original Oxford cluster.
• Emphasis on taking altruistic actions with a focus on effectiveness.
• Emphasis on quantifying the impact of altruistic actions.
• Emphasis on a scope that is in some way particularly wide-ranging or unconventional, either in sheer size or time (existential risks, the long-run future), geography (focusing on the entire world and often particularly developing countries rather than the organisation's neighbourhood), or in what is cared about (farmed animal welfare, wild animal welfare, the lives of people in the far future, and whatever the hell these people are doing).

The biggest EA events are the Effective Altruism Global (EAG) conferences organised by CEA. These usually happen several times a year, mostly in the UK and the Bay Area, though locally-organised EAGx conferences have more diverse locations.

The Situation

EA has a strong presence especially at top universities. There are large and active EA student groups in the Bay Area, Cambridge, Oxford, and London, but also increasingly New York, Boston, and Berlin, and many smaller local groups (you can find them listed here). The profile of EA in the general public is very small. However, the concentration of talent is extremely high. Add to this the existence of funding bodies with tens of billions of dollars of assets that are firmly aligned with EA principles, and you can expect a lot of important, impactful work to come from people and organisations with some connection to EA in the coming years.

It's important to keep in mind that EA is not a centralised thing. There is no EA tsar, or any single EA organisation that runs the show, or any official EA consensus. It's a cluster of many people and efforts that are joined mainly by caring about the types of ideas I talk about here.

Demographics

This website has a good overview, based on whoever filled in a survey posted to the EA Forum. The gender ratio is unfortunately somewhat skewed (70% male); for comparison, this is roughly the same as for philosophy degrees and better than for software developers (90% male (!?)). Half are 25-34. Over 70% are politically left or centre-left, and few are centre-right (2.5%) or right (1%), though almost 10% are libertarians. Education levels are high, and the five most common degrees are, in order: CS, maths, economics, social science, and philosophy. Most are from western countries.

Culture

EA culture places a lot of weight on epistemics: being honest about your uncertainties, clear about what would make you change your mind on an issue, aware of biases and fallacies, trying to avoid group-think, focusing on the substance of the issue rather than who said it or why, and arguing with the goal of finding the truth rather than defending your pet argument or cause. This is a lofty set of goals. To an astonishing but imperfect extent, and more so than any other concentration of people or writing (except from the equally-good Rationalist community mentioned above) that I've ever had any exposure to, EA succeeds at this.

Related to this, but also turbo-charged by general cultural memes of "critiquing cherished ideas is important", there's a high emphasis of constantly being on the lookout for ways in which you yourself or (in particular) common EA ideas might be wrong. If you read down the list of top-voted posts on the EA Forum, they are about:

1. Potential failure modes resulting from the influx of money into EA.
2. High EA spending being a problem for optics and epistemics.
3. Things current EA community-building efforts are doing wrong, and why this is especially worrying.
4. Reasons why some key concepts in EA are used misleadingly and unnecessarily.
5. A list of critiques of EA that someone wants expanded.
6. A catalogue of personal mistakes that someone made while trying to do good (the key one being that they focused too much on working only at EA organisations).
7. An argument that standard EA ways of trying to help with developing country development are not as effective as other ways of helping.
8. And only in 8th place, something that isn't a critique of EA: a post about the historical case of early nuclear weapons researchers mistakenly assuming they were in a race, and implications for today's AI researchers

(If you adjust upvotes on EA Forum posts to account for how active the forum was at the time, the most popular post of all time is Effective Altruism is a Question (not an ideology). It's not a critique, but it's also very revealing.)

Right now, there's an active contest with $100k in prizes for the best critiques of EA. This sort of stuff happens enough that Scott Alexander satirises it here.

This might give the impression of EA as excessively-introspective and self-doubting. There is some truth to the introspectiveness part. However, the general EA attitude is also one of making bold (but reasoned) bets. Recall SBF's altruistically-motivated risk taking, or more generally the fact that one of Open Philanthropy's foundational ideas is to support reasonable-but-risky projects, or even more generally the way EA in general is set up around unconventional and ambitious attempts at doing good.

If I had to name the two most important obstacles to doing important things in the real world, they would be (1) reasoning poorly and not updating enough based on feedback/evidence, and (2) being too risk-averse and insufficiently ambitious. Some cultures, like the good parts of academia, do well on avoiding (1). Others - imagine for example gung-ho Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs - do well on avoiding (2). Though EA culture varies a lot between places and organisations, on the whole it seems uniquely good at combining these two aspects.

There are differences in culture between different EA hubs/clusters. I mainly have experience of the UK (and especially Cambridge) cluster and the Bay Area one. In the Bay, there is significant overlap between the EA and Rationalist communities, whereas in the UK there's mainly just EA in my experience. The Bay also leans more AI-focused and maybe weirder on average (or perhaps it's just a European vs American culture thing), while in the UK there are many AI-focused people but also many focused on biological fields (biosecurity & alternative proteins) or policy.

Axes & trends

"Long-termism" vs "near-termism"

In the history of EA, it's hard not to see an invasion of ideas from the planetary-scale futurism that people like Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowsky talked about, and Toby Ord (author of The Precipice) and Will MacAskill (about to drop a new book on why we should prioritise the long-term future) increasingly focus on. Holden Karnofsky, who for a long time ran GiveWell, perhaps the most empirically-minded and global health -focused EA organisation, is now co-CEO of Open Philanthropy, responsible specifically for the speculative futurist parts of Open Philanthropy's mission, and writes blog posts about the grand future of humanity and why the coming century may be especially critical (though he is careful to say that he doesn't think the other half of Open Philanthropy's work, or global health / animal welfare -focused charity more generally, is not important).

Perhaps this makes sense. In the long run at least, it seems sensible to expect the largest-scale ideas to be the most important ones. The rate of technological progress, especially in AI, has also been shrinking just what "the long run" means when expressed in years.

The common label applied to the ends of the radical-future-technology-focused versus concrete-current-problem-focused axis are "long-termist" and "near-termist" respectively. The name "long-termist" comes from arguments that the key moral priority is making sure we get to a secure, sustainable, and flourishing future civilisation (since such a civilisation could be very large and long-lasting, and therefore enable an enormous amount of happiness and flourishing). However, the names are a bit misleading. All existential risk work is often lumped into the long-termist category, so we have "long-termist" AI safety people trying to prevent a catastrophe many of them think will probably happen in the next three decades if it happens at all, and "near-termist" global health and development people trying to help the development of countries over a century.

(Many also point out that caring about existential risks does not require the long-termist philosophy.)

Frugality vs spending

The culture of the original Oxford cluster was very frugal, and focused on monetary donations. For example, after founding Giving What We Can (GWWC), Toby Ord donated everything he earned above £ 18 000 to charity (and has continued on a similar track since then). Because of the low available funding, the focus was very much on marginal impact - trying to figure out what existing opportunity could best use one extra dollar.

Since then, the arrival of billionaires meant that funding worries went down.

(For example, "earning to give" has gone down a lot in 80 000 Hours' career rankings. This is the idea that deliberately going into a high-earning job (often in finance) and then donating a significant fraction of your salary to top charities is one of the most effective ways to do good, and a path that many pursued based on the recommendation by 80 000 Hours.)

The bottleneck has moved (or at least been widely perceived to move) from funding to the time of people working on the key problems; instead of focusing on where to allocate the marginal dollar, the focus has somewhat shifted to how to allocate the marginal minute of time. In particular, the core argument of "imagine how far this particular dollar could go if used to effectively improve health in developing countries" has been joined by the argument of "there are plausible civilisation-ending disasters that could happen in the coming decades and require hard work to solve; imagine how sad it would be if we failed to work fast enough because we didn't spend that one dollar".

As a concrete example, Redwood Research organised a machine learning bootcamp aimed at upskilling people for AI safety jobs in January 2021 (and will be running more in the future, something I strongly endorse). Thirty participants (including myself) were flown into Berkeley from around the world, and spent three weeks living in a hotel while taking daily high-reliability COVID tests that I'm pretty sure weren't entirely free (and of course spending the days programming hard and talking about AI alignment (and eating free snack bars at the office - or maybe that last part was just me)). This wasn't cheap, nor was it a typical way to spend charity money (Redwood is funded by Open Philanthropy). But if prediction markets are right that generally-capable AI starts emerging around the end of this decade, and you take one look at the current state of progress on the AI alignment problem, and you do happen to have access to funding - well, it would be sad if being too stingy is how our civilisation failed.

Concretely, to look at only one consequence, Redwood made several hires from the bootcamp, despite the fact that many of the participants (myself included) were still students or otherwise not looking for work. Given how difficult but important hiring is, especially for high-skill technical roles, and the serious possibility that organisations like Redwood making progress is important for solving AI safety problems that might play a big role in how the future of humanity shapes out, this seems like a win.

However, at the same time, it is of course worth keeping in mind that humans are pretty good at thinking to themselves "man, wouldn't it be great if people like me had lots of money?" This, as well as the PR and culture problems of having lots of money sloshing around, are discussed in many EA Forum posts. We already saw that this one (by MacAskill) and this one are, respectively, the first- and second-most upvoted posts of all time on the EA Forum.

Ultimately, the whole point of Effective Altruism is, well, being effective about altruism. Whether EA funders spend quickly or slowly, and whichever causes they target, if they fail to find the best opportunities to do good with money, they haven't succeeded - and they know it.

(It should be noted that the GWWC criterion of donating 10% of your income to charity is met by many EAs, including ones far in space or culture from the original Oxford cluster, and global health is a leading donation target.)

Thinking vs doing

The fact that there's more resources - including not just funding but also the time of talented people - also means that the focus is less on marginal impact. If you have £10 and an hour, then figuring out what existing opportunity has the best ratio of good stuff per dollar is the best bet. But if you have, say, £10 000 000 and ten thousand work hours, then there's also the option of starting new projects and organisations.

(A lot of the weirdness of EA thinking comes from its marginalist nature. The things that are most valuable per marginal unit of money/time/effort are generally the things that are most neglected, and neglected things tend to seem weird because, by definition, few people care about them. For example, the early EA focus basically completely eschewed developed country problems because per-dollar marginal cost-effectiveness was highest in poor countries; from the outside, this may look like a strangely harsh and idiosyncratic selection of causes. With increasing resources, it makes more sense to pursue larger-scale changes, and larger-scale changes sometimes look like more traditional and intuitive causes. For example, while developing country health and projects trying to improve the long-term future are Open Philanthropy's main focuses, they spend some of their massive budget on US criminal justice reform, land-use policy, and immigration policy.) (Though note that the effectiveness of the criminal justice program has come under criticism.)

Since EA now has the resources to start many new organisations, there's also starting to be a shift from EA being very research-oriented to having more and more real-world projects. Even though one of the key EA insights is that doing good requires lots of careful thinking in addition to good intentions and execution ability, the ultimate metric of success is actually improving the world, and that takes steps that aren't just research. I think EA has some headwind to overcome here; as a movement inspired, started, and (early on) largely consisting of philosophers, it has been remarkably successful in appealing to philosophical people and researchers, but not entrepreneurs or operations people to the same extent. I think it is a very welcome trend that this is starting to shift.

Exciting Attempt for Enabling Action on Essential Activities

EA is definitely not ideal, and it is also not guaranteed to survive. Like any real-world community, it is not a timeless platonic ideal of pure perfection that burst into the world fully formed, but rather something with an idiosyncratic history, that consists of real people, and has certain biases and cultural oddities. Still, I think it is probably the most exciting and useful thing in the world to be engaged with.

Review: Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels

Book: Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve, by Ian Morris (2015)
7.8k words (about 26 minutes)

 

 This post has also been published here.

 

Two hundred years ago, most people lived in societies that considered slavery, war, and discrimination based on class, ethnicity, and gender to be justifiable. Today, most people live in societies that hold the opposite beliefs.

What changed? A simple and tempting narrative is that we have simply become wiser; that various Enlightenment philosophers, thoughtful activists, and other principled people figured out that the pre-industrial moral order is wrong and managed to persuade everyone to change.

It is true that many smart and principled people had good ideas and that this was a big proximate driver of better values. But is it a coincidence that this change in values happened around the same time as the industrial revolution?

What about the previous economic revolution, the agricultural one? Did that also coincide with a change in the values that people held? The evidence says yes – foraging societies tend to be more accepting of violence and far less accepting of hierarchy than farming ones.

The argument of Ian Morris' Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels is that these timings are not a coincidence. Societies that change their main method of getting energy also change their values, because some sets of values give greater success for a certain type of society. Farming societies that stick to anti-hierarchical forager attitudes won't survive competition with farming societies that learn to believe in hierarchies (maybe they won't be economically competitive and won't be able to field as big an army to defend themselves as the god-king next door can field to conquer them). Likewise, industrial societies that stick to inflexible hierarchies and elite-focused economies can't compete with more equal democracies that don't squander the talents of the non-elite, and maintain a well-looked-after middle-class of rich consumers and educated workers.

We can contrast two ways of trying to explain the history of values. The first says that the history of values is a history of ideas; a battle of ideas against other ideas, waged in the minds of people. The second says that the history of values is a history of what works best. The battle is between the benefits conferred by believing in certain ideas and those conferred by other ones, and it is waged out in the real world, where empires fall or rise based on whether they value the things that will lead them to success.

It is clear that neither style of explanation is enough on its own. No matter how persuasive it can be made, a sufficiently destructive idea – as an extreme example, that everyone should commit suicide – will not find its adherents in charge of the future (or coming from the opposite direction: why do you think many religions are so big on the "be fruitful and multiply" point?). On the other hand, no matter how practically useful a certain idea is, someone has to have the idea and persuade other people to adopt it as a value before it has a chance of spreading because of its practical benefits.

The question, then, is just how far can we push the deterministic account, where the methods of energy capture constrain values. In Ian Morris' telling, the answer is surprisingly far, and if his account of the history of values is correct, I agree with him (in particular, the similarities of farming society values across continents is hard to explain otherwise). However, I think Morris, along with most people who advance or accept similar arguments, goes too far with the moral pragmatism that these ideas may be thought to imply.

But first: what values did foragers, farmers, and fossil fuel users actually hold, and what is Morris' energy-based explanation of the changes between them?

 

Foragers

Everyone has some idea of what a forager or hunter-gatherer is, but since we want to deal with differences between foragers and farmers, we want a clear idea of where the line is. Morris cites a good definition by Catherine Panter-Brick: foragers are people who "exercise no deliberate alteration of the gene pool of exploited resources". If you plant and harvest a few naturally occurring plants, you're still a forager, but when you start refining the crops generation by generation or breeding the animals, that's the point when you become a farmer.

Of course, there is a vast amount of variance in culture, lifestyle, and values between different forager bands. To almost every generalisation about foragers, there exists some tribe that does the opposite. However, Morris argues that for each main type of human society (foraging/farming/industrial), it is useful to talk about the average set of values such societies held or tended to develop towards, at least in terms of the broad categories of tolerance of political/economic/gender hierarchy and propensity to violence. This covers up lots of important questions – different societies may have justified violence under different circumstances, or had different reasons for why economic inequality was acceptable, but such differences are sucked up into one category and ignored in this sort of analysis. That this makes sense will become apparent once we see that foragers, farmers, and fossil fuel users can be sensibly compared and contrasted even at this very general level.

In some ways, forager values are familiar. Even among foragers, possession and ownership are big deals, with every item generally having an owner. In other ways, they're surprisingly different.

Take violence. Though it's very difficult to come up with exact figures for anything to do with foragers (ancient foragers left behind only bones and tools, and modern foragers only live in places that farmers didn't want, so might not be a representative sample), the chance of dying by murder may have been around 10% in an average forager tribe, compared to 0.7% today, 1-2% across the 1900s (including all wars), roughly 5% in your average farming society or in the most murderous countries of today, and 20% for Poland during World War II.

This was not recognised by anthropologists until the 1990s or so because, as Morris explains:

"[T]he social scale imposed by foraging is so small that even high rates of murder are difficult for outsiders to detect. If a band with a dozen members has a 10% rate of violent death, it will suffer roughly one homicide every twenty-five years, and since anthropologists rarely stay in the field for even twenty-five months, they will witness very few violent deaths."

This is why Elizabeth Marshall Thomas' !Kung ethnography was called "The Gentle People", even though "their murder rate was much the same as what Detroit would endure at the peak of its crack cocaine epidemic".

Foragers are also extremely averse to hierarchy. Perhaps the best summary is given by a !Kung San forager asked about the absence of chiefs:

"Of course we have headmen! In fact we’re all headmen … Each one of us is headman over himself!"

It's not just that foragers don't have strict hierarchies and this behaviour falls out naturally as a result; they are actively opposed to any sort of hierarchy or inequality. Material inequality is considered morally wrong, and fairness essential. Pressure to share spoils is applied liberally. And as in any group of humans, you'll have upstarts who try to achieve greatness and power, but such people usually have opposition groups immediately form to hold them back. Anthropologist Christopher Boehm calls these "reverse dominance hierarchies"; Morris translates this as "coalitions of losers".

The one sort of inequality that foragers aren't opposed to is gender inequality, with the dominant role in politics and violence generally falling to men (as an example of this attitude, Morris cites a forager of the Ona people (also known as the Selk'nam or Onawo) saying "the men are all captains and the women are sailors"). However, the gender inequality in forager societies is still on a different level from the extreme gender inequality and regimentation of farmer societies, and attitudes about sex were looser too. Morris writes that "abused wives regularly just walk away [...] without much fuss or criticism, and attitudes towards marital fidelity and premarital virginity tend to be quite relaxed".

 

Farmers

As with foragers, Morris lumps together farming societies into one ideal type, labelled Agraria by Ernest Gellner. As before, this covers up a lot of variation (in particular, he identifies horticulturalists, city states like classical Athens or medieval Venice, and proto-industrial nations like Qing dynasty China, Mughal India, Ottoman Turkey, and Enlightenment Western Europe as the three extremes of Agraria), but Morris argues "the exceptions and sub-categories should not be allowed to obscure the reality of an ideal type representing in abstract terms the core features of peasant farming society". He cites Robert Redfield:

"[I]f a peasant from [any one of widely separated farming societies] could have been transported by some convenient genie to any one of the others and equipped with a knowledge of the language in the village to which he had been moved, he would very quickly come to feel at home. And this would be because the fundamental orientations of life would be unchanged. The compass of his career would continue to point to the same moral north."

So what is the moral north of farming societies? Perhaps surprisingly, it's almost as hard to make definite conclusions about what anyone other than the elite thought in agrarian societies as it is to make conclusions about foragers.

While the elite read and wrote a lot, they didn't care much about what the peasants thought, and peasants were not literate. The most literate ancient societies – for example Athens in the 4th and 5th centuries BCE – had a rudimentary literacy rate of 10%, so one person in ten might be able to glean some meaning from words, but how well they could set down their thoughts on moral values is a different question. To get higher literacy rates, you have to move in time to the early second millennium, and in space to urban China or western Europe. Morris writes that "genuine mass literacy, with half or more of the population able to read simple sentences, belongs to the age of fossil fuels”, and because of this, most of “our evidence for peasant experience comes from archaeology and accounts by twentieth-century anthropologists, rural sociologists, and development economists." If history is the written record of the past, then the majority of the population lived their lives outside history until the past century or two. (Perhaps we might even say that history in this sense only began with the internet age, when the private lives of everyone began being set down.)

Before going into the trickier question of values, we can compare foragers and farmers in some simple ways. First, their energy consumption was higher. Foragers, like all humans, need to eat about eight and a half megajoules (2000 kilocalories) of energy as food per person per day to stay alive. Add cooking, and total energy consumption roughly doubles. The energy use of agrarian societies starts out at a forager level of around 20 MJ/person/day (5000 kcal), and goes up to the 100-150 MJ/person/day level (compare to 500 MJ/person/day (120 000 kcal), plus/minus a factor of two or so, for modern rich industrial nations).

Second, farming societies have very roughly perhaps half as few violent deaths as foragers, due to the existence of governments that at least occasionally kept the peace.

However, their life wasn't better on most metrics. In contrast to the literature (both then and now) full of "tales of vagabonds, wandering minstrels, and young men striking out to make their fortunes", "most farmers lived in worlds much smaller than most foragers had done, and never went much more than a day or two’s walk from the villages they were born in". Not only this, but:

"Excavated skeletons suggest that ancient farmers tended to suffer more than foragers from repetitive stress injuries; their teeth were often terrible, thanks to restricted diets heavy on sugary carbohydrates; and their stature, which is a fairly good proxy for overall nutrition, tended to fall slightly with the onset of agriculture, not increasing noticeably until the twentieth century AD."

No farming society even managed to escape the repeating cycles of population growth and starvation that foragers were also prone to, despite having more direct control over their food supplies. Populations would increase to keep pace with the good times until all farmers were slaving way to stay at subsistence levels given the crowdedness and quality of the land. Then many would starve to death when the bad times came.

Another trend across the history of farming societies is three things coinciding: energy consumption rises above 40 MJ (twice the minimum agrarian level and the typical forager level), towns grow past 10 000 people, and a few people take charge and start bossing around the others with their governments.

In farming societies, widespread respect and reverence for hierarchy was internalised by everyone. Morris writes that “[f]arming society often seemed obsessed with the symbolism of rank”, and twentieth century anthropologists "regularly found that having a healthy respect for authority – knowing your place – was a key part of their informants’ sense of themselves as good people". This often came, and still comes, as a surprise to non-farmers:

"[W]hen European reformers began venturing outside their urban enclaves into the countryside in the eighteenth century, they were often astonished that instead of complaining about inequality and demanding the redistribution of property, peasants largely took it as right and proper that most people were poor and weak while a few were rich and strong."

Especially revered was the "Old Deal", Morris' term for the generalised social contract between classes in agrarian societies: that some have the duty to be commanders (or "shepherds of the people", in the preferred phrasing of many a king), others to obey those commands, and if everyone follows this script then things work fine.

Even when the powerful were questioned, the questioning didn't go as far as the Old Deal itself. In fact it rarely reached the king. “The tsar is good but the boyars [aristocrats] are bad", goes a Russian saying; even those who protested the powerful assumed that the highest levels of power must be good and holy, and the problems came from their will being incorrectly carried out by lesser lords. Even when the king himself came under fire, the Old Deal itself, or the inequality it entailed, were not questioned. The most common sort of rebellion against a king took what Morris calls a "good-old-days form": the justification was that the king had broken the Old Deal (or been abandoned by the gods or lost the Mandate of Heaven) and the urgent need was to restore the days when the right dictator was in charge, not abolish the dictatorship in the first place.

There were exceptions – in the 1640s some Chinese peasants called themselves "Levelling Kings" and went around questioning who gave their rulers the right to call them serfs, and of course there's the gradual English case and the rather more abrupt French case – but these only came when the societies in question started hitting energy consumptions of 150 MJ/day, the very highest end that agrarian societies could achieve without a full-on industrial revolution.

(Morris implies that the energy consumption is the cause. This seems backwards; an explanation running through the institutions and organisation needed to sustain this energy level seems much more reasonable. In general, perhaps when Morris talks about "energy consumption", you should read "the societal factors that enable higher energy consumption" in its place.)

Given how anti-hierarchy foragers were, how did this come to be? Were the peasants all forced into a rigid hierarchy by ruthless elites?

'“You may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all the time; but you can’t fool all the people all the time,” Abraham Lincoln is supposed to have said (unless it was P. T. Barnum). But Korsgaard and Seaford apparently think that Lincoln/Barnum was wrong, and that for ten thousand years everyone in Agraria was led by the nose—women by men, poor by rich, everyone by priests—and robbed blind. This I just cannot credit. Humans are the cleverest animals on the planet (for all we know, the cleverest in the whole universe). We have worked out the answers to almost every problem we have ever encountered. So how, if farming values were really just a trick perpetrated by wicked elites, did they survive for ten millennia? Most of the farmers I have met have been canny folk; so why could farmers in the past not figure out what was going on behind the wizard’s veil?

The answer, in my opinion, is that there was no veil. The veil is a figment of modern academics’ imaginations, made necessary by the assumption that only a tiny elite could possibly have thought that hierarchy was a good thing. In reality, farmers had farming values not because they fell for a trick but because they had common sense.'

It is clearly a mistake to think that farmers participated in farming societies and its values through gritted teeth. However, I don't think it was so much farmers' common sense that made them adopt farming values. Societies that brainwashed their members into sincerely accepting farming-era hierarchies did better, and eventually all farming societies mastered this art.

 

Specific inequalities: forced labour and patriarchy

In addition to the general extreme hierarchy of farming societies, there are two specific types of inequality that are both interesting in their causes and tragic in their consequences.

The first is slavery, and forced labour more generally. Both are almost entirely absent in foraging bands, which might take captives from other tribes but usually eventually integrate them into the tribe rather than keeping them forever as slaves. In contrast, some form of forced labour is found in almost every agrarian society.

Why? Because financial institutions weren't strong enough. Markets for labour existed almost everywhere, but there was a problem: “anyone who had enough land to support a family preferred to make a living by working it rather than by selling labor”, because, without reliable banks for everyone, keeping a good farm was the only robust way to accumulate and maintain wealth, especially for your children. When it was time for a big construction project (maybe the pharaoh died and you need a pyramid to bury him in), even wealthy employers like the state couldn't always hire enough workers. Often they resorted to violence to lower the costs of labour. Violence, after all, came cheap.

The second specific kind of inequality was male domination and strict gender roles. Morris offers a two-pronged explanation. First, farmer men had more reason than forager men to keep farmer/forager women under control:

“The main reason that male foragers generally care less than male farmers about controlling women [...] is that foragers have much less to inherit than farmers. [...] [Q]uestions about the legitimacy of children matter a lot less than they do when only legitimate offspring will inherit land and capital.”

(We might ask why farming societies were so strict about only legitimate offspring inheriting property, but perhaps this is a case of biological values limiting the space of cultural variation.)

Second, gender roles became more regimented out of necessity. Agricultural work – plowing, manuring, and irrigation – relies on brute upper body strength, which favours males. Farmers worked harder in general than foragers, so more male-specific strength-based work also pushed everything else – home upkeep (which foragers didn't need to do) and food processing – onto women. As early as 7000 BCE, skeletons from Syria suggest that both genders regularly carried heavy loads, but only women had an arthritic condition caused by kneeling and footwork, probably as a result of grinding grain.

Finally, child bearing is obviously restricted to women. With the advent of farming, the doubling time for populations fell by a factor of five, from ten thousand to two thousand years. Infant mortality seems not to have changed, so this is due to increased birth rates alone.

Morris writes that this decision on gender norms seems so obvious that "no farming society that moved beyond horticulture ever seems to have decided anything else". According to him, "if we sit theorizing in our fossil-fuel studies" we might imagine an alternative were women had the upper hand, "sending otherwise-useless men out to labor for them in the fields, but in reality, the organizational needs of farming societies gave men the means to inflict devastating economic pain on faithless wives while also raising the costs for men of failing to deter women from bringing cuckoos back to the nest". The empirical correlation between gender inequality and farming societies seems strong and Morris' arguments are plausible, but whether they're the final word is less clear.

Of course, you can't hold everyone down all the time. Morris lists many historical cases of people who were slaves and/or women, but nevertheless defied expectations and attained great success. For example, Morris tells the story of an Athenian slave banker called Pasion, who did so well that he was eventually not only able to buy his own freedom but also the bank itself.

(Interestingly, Wikipedia tells the story slightly differently, saying he was manumitted as a reward for his work, and inherited the bank after his former owners retired, rather than by buying it outright. Wikipedia cites the 1971 Athenian Propertied Families by J. K. Davies; Morris cites Edward Cohen's Athenian Economy and Society and Jeremy Trevett's Apollorodus Son of Pasion, both from 1992. I don't know who to believe, or whether a consensus exists.)

Morris' harsh conclusion is that both forced labour and patriarchy were "functionally necessary to farming societies that generated more than 10k kcal/cap/day [42 MJ/cap/day]”.

 

Fossil-fuel users

Many places underwent the agricultural revolution independently of each other, because farming spread slow enough that distant people could invent it on their own before the waves of someone else's discovery of farming reached them. In contrast, the industrial revolution happened in north-west Europe fast enough, and gave big enough advantages, that no other region had an independent industrial revolution.

The culture and values of the post-industrial West – democracy, human rights, individualism, market-orientedness, and so on – are often labelled Western. In some sense this is a tautology; by definition, these are the values that Western countries have at the moment. The label is also used in a deeper sense, to mean that there is some kernel of Westernness in these values that makes them the logical conclusion of pre-industrial Western thought, and perhaps incompatible with different cultural bases.

One consequence of Morris' arguments is that this perspective is wrong. What we might call Western values are no more Western values than farming-era values are Sumerian values (or Indus Valley values or Mesoamerican values or ...); the reason Western values are called Western values but farming values aren't called Sumerian values is that the industrial revolution spread faster than the agricultural one. To explain Western values we should look not at ancient Greek philosophers and whatnot but at the demands of industrialised societies.

This does not mean that every industrialised society will approach the West in its values, only that the pressures are there (and wily enough dictators or future technological trends may be enough to avoid them). It might also be that the reason that Europe underwent an industrial revolution while other societies at the edges of agrarian achievement did not is that, by accidents of history and geography, pre-industrial north-west European values were closer to modern industrial values than those of the other societies that have stood at the cusp of industrialisation.

But the overall conclusion remains: "Western" values are the universal values that industrialised societies tend towards. The conflict between Boko Haram or the Taliban and the West, to use two of Morris' examples, is not so much a conflict of culture versus culture, but of era versus era; a last stand of the hierarchy- and patriarchy-obsessed farming values that were held by everyone (except a forager here or there) until a few hundreds years ago. On a more granular level, the steady retreat of discrimination and formality from Western societies is simply the gradual acceptance that these vestiges of the farming era are no longer useful.

As with the transition to farming society, there's the question of how people eventually reached almost opposite stances of what their ancestors had believed. Unlike with the agricultural revolution, the question is especially pressing because the timescale of the changes is so short. But once again, a lot of it was driven by economics.

The first step was people moving from countryside farming to factory jobs:

"Nineteenth-century sources make it very clear that entering the wage-labor market could be a traumatic experience, requiring workers to submit to strict time discipline and factory conditions unlike anything they had known in the countryside; and yet millions chose to do so, because the alternative—hunger—was worse.

So eager were poor farmers for dirty, dangerous factory jobs that British employers only needed to increase wages by 5 percent (in real terms) between 1780 and 1830, although output per worker grew by 25 percent. Wage increases accelerated only in the 1830s, and even then only for urban workers. The great motor was productivity, which was now rising so high that employers began finding it cheaper to share some of their profits with their workers than to try to break strikes. (In another great irony, by the time that Dickens, Marx, and Engels were writing, wages were rising faster than ever before in history.) For the next fifty years, wages rose as fast as productivity; after 1880, they rose even faster. By then, incomes were beginning to rise in the countryside too.”

One resulting value change was the abolition of forced labour:

“By making wage labour attractive enough to draw in millions of free workers, higher wages made forced labor less necessary, and because impoverished serfs and slaves—unlike the increasingly prosperous wage labourers—could rarely buy the manufactured goods being churned out by factories, forced labour increasingly struck business interests as an obstacle to growth (especially when it was competitors who were using it).”

The farmer-era justifications for gender hierarchy also broke down. First, industrialised societies had less need for brute strength and more need for organisational work, in which there is no gender disparity. Second, birth rates eventually went down, reducing the amount of time women spent on children. As a result, almost universal male dominance during the farming era has given way to a world where 81% of people say gender equality is important, including 98% in Britain but also over 90% of Indonesians and Turks and even 78% of Iranians (India, with a very low 60% and a huge population, is probably the biggest drag on the average).

Morris offers a great summary of the principles of success in agrarian versus industrial societies:

“Agraria had worked by drawing lines, not just between elite and mass or men and women, but also between believers and nonbelievers, pure and defiled, free and slave, and countless other categories. Each group was assigned its place in a complex hierarchy of mutual obligations and privileges, tied together by the Old Deal and guaranteed by the gods and the threat of violence. Fossil-fuel societies, however, work best by erasing lines. The more a group replaces the rigid structure of figure 3.6 with the anti-structure of figure 4.7—a completely empty box, made up of interchangeable citizens—the bigger and more efficient its markets will be and the better it will function in the fossil-fuel world.”

The most successful agrarian social structure have a social structure like the one above; the most successful industrial societies look like this instead:

This, in a nutshell, is why agrarian societies tend towards extreme hierarchy while industrial societies tend towards a social structure of interchangeable mobile individuals, free to do what they want and incentivised to slot themselves wherever they create the most value (at least economically).

With industrialisation, we've managed to roll back the discrimination and hierarchy of the farming age. We've even gone back to valuing fairly flat political hierarchies like the foragers (though we maintain them through democratic institutions rather than "coalitions of losers"), and become more egalitarian about gender than the foragers were, all the while living in societies far less violent than the average hunter-gatherer band.

There is one area where we're more tolerant of hierarchy than foragers, though: economic inequality. Once again the reason is practical:

"[...] Industria can flourish only if it has affluent middle and working classes that create effective demand for all the goods and services that fossil-fuel economies generate, but on the other, it also needs a dynamic entrepreneurial class that expects material rewards for providing leadership and management. In response, fossil-fuel values have evolved across the last two hundred years to favor government intervention to reduce wealth equality—but not too much.”

However, even then we still abhor the farmer-era standard of seeing it as fair when the elite extract as much as they can from everyone under them. In fact, merely the fact that calling elites extractive has become a good political weapon shows how far we've come – as discussed in the farming section, farming-era people saw ruthlessly extractive elites as part of a fair social contract.

 

A summary of value evolution?

We've just gone over a lot of detail about foragers, farmers, and fossil-fuel user values, and some reasons why values might have developed in the way they did. Is this a story of a random path through the stages of technological development, with harsh selection pressures making sure that societal values are dragged along for the ride? Or is there some pattern to the madness?

Morris' summary table does a good job of summing up the "what" of it:

Two things leaps out from this table, especially if we plot it graphically: when it comes to attitudes towards hierarchy, fossil-fuel users are much closer to foragers than farmers are to anyone, and violence has gone down all along.

(Slide from a talk I gave at EA Cambridge)

 

Other people have noticed this; economist and futurist Robin Hanson has written about the modern conservative-liberal axis mapping onto how willing people are to abandon farming ways and revert to more forager-like lifestyles and values as societies grow richer (as some people inexplicably prefer writing in digestible chunks rather than monolithic book-length blog posts, it's hard to give just one or two key links, but see for example here, here, here, and here).

Perhaps we can tell a story like this: in the beginning there were foragers. They tended to live as people tend to do, and value the things that evolution had crafted people to want. Humans being humans, there was a lot of politicking, and with no institutions to restrain it, a fair amount of violence. The outside world was harsh and outside anyone's control.

Then the agricultural revolution slowly creeped across the world. At first people lived as before, but generation by generation it turned out that the societies that managed to best persuade people to accept a bit more hierarchy – to show a bit more obedience to the chiefs, grant a bit less non-reproductive status to women – did a bit better than the others. Over millennia, such societies either had their tricks independently discovered or copies by others, or then outright went warpath to subjugate over societies to their rule – and, of course, preach their values, which (given human adaptability) they held sincerely, and with no idea that they thought differently from their distant ancestors. Eventually, the big tricks – organised religion and the god-kings keeping power by letting their henchmen extract as much as they could from their subjects – became almost universal. They also lowered the level of violence by imposing some amount of internal order and perhaps a culture promoting peaceful conflict resolution, if only to spare more strength to throw at neighbouring societies.

Then came the industrial revolution, and suddenly what mattered is how well a society could harness the talents of its members and establish efficient, competitive markets to drive innovation. This created pressures to democratise and erase lines between people. Technology and wealth also increased people's ability to control their lives. Rich and comfortable industrialised people no longer needed to abide by strict farming-era social rules to survive, and so slowly gave up on them, reverting back to more forager-like ways, though with the added advantages of unprecedented peace and material wellbeing.

 

How selection pressures change values

The reasons why societies tend to adopt pragmatic values are subtle; it's not as if people go around cynically holding the values that will best contribute to their tribe's or society's long-term success. As a result, Morris' descriptions of how selection pressures do their work are worth quoting at length.

First, here's how farmers ended up dominating the world in the first place:

“The first farmers had free will, just like us. As their families grew, their landscapes filled up. […] For all we know, some foragers in the Jordan Valley ten thousand years ago [chose to remain foragers]. The problem, though, was that they were not making a one-time choice. Tens of thousands of other people were asking the same question, and each family had to revisit the decision of whether to intensify or go hungry multiple times every year. Most important of all, each time one family chose to work harder and intensify its management of plants and animals, the payoffs from sticking with the old ways declined a little further for everyone else. Every time cultivators started thinking of the plants and animals on which they lavished care and attention as their personal gardens and flocks, not part of a common stock, hunting and gathering would become that much more difficult for those who stuck to it. Foragers who clung stubbornly and/or heroically to the old ways were doomed because the odds kept tilting against them.”

But how did this result in a world of dictator kings? Morris:

“We should probably assume that people tried lots of different ways to solve the collective action problem of how to create larger, more integrated societies with more complex divisions of labor as they moved from foraging to farming, but almost everywhere, it seems that the solution that worked best was the idea of the godlike king.”

Morris isn't very clear on why godlike kings, out of all possible forms of social organisation, worked best. We can imagine that it's hard to coordinate big armies for defence or offence without one, or that the symbolism of a godlike figurehead is the most reliable way to unite masses in a largely illiterate society, or vaguely gesture like Morris at the challenges of managing complex societies, but there doesn't seem to be much hard evidence or reason for a precise mechanism one way or the other, at least in Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels.

In general, collective action problems are important in any large organisation, and the simplest solution is complete centralisation; effectively reducing collective action problems back into individual action problems. Of course, this comes with all the cruelties and inefficiencies of real-world non-omnibenevolent, non-omniscient centralised decision-making. Given this, was the centralisation-vs-decentralisation tradeoff really so simple in the farming era that "godlike kings everywhere" was the only effective answer? Perhaps the tradeoffs really were that one-sided in the farming age, and this became a trickier question only in the industrial age when nurturing human talent and prosperity became key societal goals, and we created effective decentralised institutions like free markets and democracy. Or maybe there was a high but not extreme level of optimal centralisation, but the greed of individual rulers often pushed their societies past this level despite selection pressures working in favour of more responsibly lead societies, and it was only with the industrial age that these pressures became high enough to force the world away from the godlike king model.

Morris also describes the rise of capitalism:

“Capitalism took off in early-modern Western Europe because practical people figured out that this was the most effective way to get things done in an increasingly energy-rich world. Other people disagreed, and did things differently. Conflicts and compromises ensued as the competitive logic of cultural evolution went to work and drove the less effective ways extinct.”

Once again, I think the concept of selection pressures is a powerful lens, but the details of what drives the relationship are missing. What exactly was it about an energy-rich environment that made capitalism ideal? Even by Morris' own account, it seems the methods (e.g. complex manufacturing chains, mature financial institutions, etc.) required to most effectively extract and use energy given a particular technology level are what matter, not the raw total of joules consumed per person per day.

 

Respondents

Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels originated from the Tanner Lectures at Princeton. As part of the format, the book includes four responses to Morris' arguments, by Richard Seaford, Jonathan Spence, Christine Korsgaard, and Margaret Atwood.

On the whole, these responses don't add much to book, though they are helpful in making Morris elaborate on his arguments in the final chapter (cheekily entitled "My Correct Views on Everything").

Seaford and Spence provide short chapters that seem to be more about their own interests than Morris' arguments, and have the tone of questions asked by professors who slept through the talk but are still trying to say something insightful at the questions session.

Atwood, of The Handmaid's Tale fame, brings an arsenal of literary flair to bear on the task. She manages to make some good points (what about horse-riding pastoralists, who may have been the first large-scale war-makers?), along with some ridiculous statements:

“Several billion years ago, marine algae produced the atmosphere that allows us to breathe, and these algae continue to produce from 60 to 80 percent of our oxygen. Without marine algae, we ourselves cannot survive. During the Vietnam War, huge vats of Agent Orange were being shipped across the Pacific. Should they have sunk and leaked, we would not be having this conversation today.”

Let's do some very rough calculations. If all the Agent Orange deployed in Vietnam had been uniformly distributed across the Pacific, the mass concentration of its component acids (making the highest assumptions about what concentration it was sprayed at) would have been lower than one part in tens of trillions, a hundred thousand times lower than the mass concentrations of either lead or mercury already in the oceans. I couldn't find any study of what happens to algae in oceans if you dump Agent Orange on them, but one article about using algaecide in swimming pools says applying one ten-thousandth of the pool volume is typical. Another article mentions 5-10% as a common concentration, giving an algae-killing active ingredient concentration of maybe 1 in 100 000 in water. Agent Orange would need to kill algae at ten million times lower concentrations in oceans than commercial algaecide does in swimming pools for the Pacific's oxygen production to be destroyed.

(Or maybe Atwood means the literal sense that, because of various butterfly effects, any such change in history makes any present event, including this conversation, unlikely?)

By far the most substantive response comes from the philosopher Christine Korsgaard. She also has the idea that the farming era was an aberration, with a fresh interpretation:

“Instead of thinking that values are determined by modes of energy capture, perhaps we should think that as human beings began to be in a position to amass power and property in the agricultural age, forms of ideology set in that distorted real moral values [i.e. the values a society should hold], distortions that we are only now, in the age of science and extensive literacy, beginning to overcome.”

More significantly, she makes a distinction between the values a society holds and values that should be held (“positive values” and “real moral values” respectively), in contrast to Morris' arguments that such a distinction is meaningless and the only real distinction is between biological values and the form they take in a given society. Her response manages to pick away at Morris' nonchalant bulldozing of all philosophical subtleties.

Responding to this in the last chapter, Morris quotes, and then dismisses, Ernest Gellner's response to a social theory presentation at an archaeology conference: "They tell me you're a good archaeologist, so why are you trying to be a bad philosopher?". Perhaps he should have taken the question more to heart.

 

The future

The experiment of how to switch from foraging to farming was run many times. Forager bands in many places adopted farming techniques. Some of them had good ideas about how to structure their now-farming societies and succeeded, while others had bad ideas and perished, or were forced to copy techniques from the more successful.

In contrast, today the entire world has been thrust into the industrial age in the space of a few hundred years. There is only one experiment going on, and only one chance to get it right. There's no one to copy from to see what we should do, and no one to pick up the job if our attempt fails.

A successful transition to the industrial world, and whatever we might mark as the next step after that, is therefore less certain than the successful transition from foragers to farmers. The values that industrial life imposes on us might be better than the those of the farming age, but it is not yet clear if they will become as universal as hierarchies and kings once were.

(Better by which standard? I think humans are similar enough that there is a context-independent universal human ethical framework.)

Morris' arguments also lead to the question of how values might change in the future. Will the set of values that a society tends towards continue to improve as technology and wealth increases, or is the cuddliness of industrial values (compared to farming ones) a fluke?

The significance of Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels for this question is that we won't necessarily be the ones deciding. Over a span of years or decades, we can maintain our values through argument and education. Over a span of centuries, though, we can argue all we like, just as countless luddites and aristocrats railed against industrial/Western values, but if the game has changed and someone else's values make them play it better, it won't be enough. The harsh logic of evolution-like selection pressures can't be resisted forever; those that are best at spreading themselves into the future will eventually claim it.

Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens, says that once we can engineer desires, the question is not "what do we want to become?", but "what do we want to want?". Morris counters that the real question is instead "what are we going to want, whether we want it or not?", and his answer is bleak yet pragmatic: "each age gets the thought it needs" ("needs" referring to "survival needs").

I don't think we need to be either nihilistic (in thinking that every set of societal values is as good as any other; some do a better job of serving universal human wants), nor pessimistic (in thinking that we can't do anything about a slide to worse values; we've never had more control over the future of our world).

Morris writes:

“Trying to imagine people who are somehow divorced from the demands of capturing energy and then speculating about what their moral values would be is an odd activity.”

I disagree. Of course we can imagine people living without being constrained by energy needs. How many science fiction writers or futurists haven't imagined a post-scarcity society?

In fact, aren't we well on our way towards such a world? Forager and farmer lives were significantly shaped by the need to get food, water, light, and warmth. Today in developed countries, these aren't free, but our lives aren't shaped by worrying about them. Sure, you need to work a job, but what you worry about in the job is likely very far separated from survival needs, and provided you have one and aren't massively wasteful, the water and light flows exactly as you want it. Technological progress removes difficulty and scarcity. Ultimately, there's no physical limit stopping us from removing scarcity considerations from our lives (or, more precisely, making them trivial enough that we don't need to worry about them; nothing is ever entirely free in this universe).

Once we've done so, no longer have to make compromises between what we should do and what we as a society are forced to value in order to survive. And so I think it is reasonable to imagine humans whose values aren't warped by survival needs; in fact such values might be good ones to aim for.

(Or maybe the need to focus at least a bit on survival is the one anchor to objective reality that prevents societies from losing themselves entirely to petty politicking and status games.)

Of course, there's always the problem of competition. What happens to our happy post-scarcity society when the people next door ratchet up the competition, say by throwing off all the safeguards around capitalism, or developing AIs or nanomachines or Robin Hanson's emulated minds, and then outcompeting us by adopting values more suitable to exploiting those technologies? Even if we ourselves don't suffer – say we have a big enough wall – in the long run we'd give up the rest of the world (or solar system or galaxy) to the pragmatic-valued competitors. At best, the long-term future looks like an oasis of human flourishing, surrounded by a galaxy-spanning alien economy with weird but morally neutral ways. (Imagine a forager tribe considering the massive and weird industrialised world around them; now imagine we're the foragers.) At worst, any good in our oasis would be outweighed by the morally bad machinations that fuel the endless growth of that weird galaxy-spanning alien economy.

So will we be forced to compromise ever more and more to avoid being outrun by those with fewer scruples about changing their values? Or can we build a world where human values are a winning strategy?

Looking at our track record, I think we have a chance.

 

Related:
Growth and civilisation