Does Trump show effective altruists were wrong to prioritize overseas charity?

The importance of a problem does not mean everyone should focus on it.

Shortly after the election there was a post on the Effective Altruism subreddit titled “I regret focusing on international work.” Its author expressed understandable pain, fear, and sadness that the American system they grew up in was under attack in ways that jeopardized “education, human rights, bodily autonomy and democracy.” They expressed regret for not focusing on these problems sooner, in part because they were convinced by EA reasoning to prioritize international interventions instead. Here’s a long excerpt:

“America is undergoing both philosophical and cultural upheaval and I find that the vast majority of it targets me as an 'other' and as something they do not want more of, in any sense. I regret not spending more of my time and resources making sure I was seen and perhaps even valued in this community and I regret that so much of my work has put me directly or indirectly in contact with the wealthy who thought that doing good only mattered abroad.

So much of the funding within America as 'charity' has come from increasingly conservative, religious-affiliated, and extremist groups that have shifted the tone in dangerous ways. It was wrong to leave these communities without the same care and attention I and others have offered the international community.

The very self-flattering effective altruism calculations that assume international charity is the best investment fails to weight the possibilities that the people making the contributions will themselves be extinguished or their ability to do so in the future destroyed by their choices to ignore local concerns, or to leave local and national issues in the hands of people whose values are in no way allow a sustainable charitable framework or for effective altruism itself to continue.

Watching women in Texas die, for democracy to be under attack, for education to be under attack, for the careers of my closest collaborators and healthcare workers to be eligible for being 'fired' or laid off or defunded is more than upsetting. I regret not defending and investing in the local communities with the charity and goodwill and energy I would send abroad. I regret assuming people were safe.

I'm not saying one episode of NOVA or NPR funding or the NSF or W.H.O. funding, or a liberal arts college, is worth more than a life that can be saved with a mosquito net, I'm saying that by not defending all those institutions we are limiting the ability to produce people who value saving lives with mosquito nets. Effective altruism was not meant to be a method of suicide for the giver.

I don't know who to pass the torch to at this point and I deeply, deeply regret not spending more time with the local communities, teaching them why this matters and why the lives of minorities, LGBTQ+, women, the disabled, the vulnerable isn't some foreign excursion, it matters here too.”

This week especially, I imagine many people relate to these sentiments. We’re watching Trump and Elon flout the law to run roughshod over our constitutional order, most recently by seizing Congress's budgetary powers (ex: appropriations to USAID) in ways that make the President ever closer to a dictator. An amoral, unstable, unelected tycoon is speedrunning a video game with the federal budget, illegally breaking crucial government functions he does not understand. These actions have already put millions of lives, liberal democracy, and the future of humanity at risk—and we’re only 17 days into Trump’s presidency.

Even according to EA’s own priorities, then, Trump has the potential to reverse or undercut the sum of EA efforts to date across multiple cause areas, from global health to animal welfare to existential risks. At a time like this, it sounds stubborn and myopic to insist that distributing malaria bed nets or tweaking wonky regulations on AI or biosecurity is the most impactful use of one’s altruistic resources. Isn’t EA missing the forest for the trees?

I sympathize with these feelings. I’m conscious that I am probably more sheltered from the direct effects of Trump’s presidency than most, including this Redditor, which makes it easier to separate the questions involved. And I don’t just understand their regret in the abstract—I strongly relate to it. I wish I could turn back time and shout warnings from the rooftops about what's happened to our country. Trump’s return to power pains me, scares me, and worries me for neighbors more directly impacted than I am. I dread the next four years. I rage at the people doing it, or trivializing it.

But I don't share this poster’s regret. Because I strongly suspect that what's happening to our country is not something I could have stopped. No offense, but I don't think you could have stopped it either.

I’m confident about this because there are tens of millions of Americans with values similar to ours who DID try to stop it. Not just by posting on the internet, but with their dollars or as their full-time profession.

These people prioritized the exact sort of work this Reddit poster regrets not entering. They became teachers, health workers, community organizers, public servants, judges, prosecutors, and journalists. They became lawyers for Planned Parenthood, or Amnesty International, or migrants, or Guantanamo detainees. They volunteered for political campaigns, or to staff elected officials at the local, state, and federal levels. They volunteered for their local food bank, or library, or mutual aid society. Many of them shunned wealthy donors and prioritized grassroots activism—but they also had far more funding from wealthy donors than the entire EA community has marshaled. More than Republicans, even.

To their credit, they made real gains. They elected the first black president; legalized gay marriage; launched the #MeToo movement, and earned massive professional and academic gains for women; passed Obamacare, environmental protections, and transformational investments in green energy. At the local level, they passed many minimum wage hikes and higher education budgets. They successfully nudged their professional and media cultures to the left.

And because they, like this poster, passionately believed that everyone should be "seen and perhaps even valued" in their communities, they used that cultural power to go further. They got pronouns in bios and used the word Latinx. They shouted down speakers they disagreed with, and majorly transformed what sort of language was permitted on social media throughout the 2010s. They took to the streets in 2020, and again after October 7th. They rallied online movements to dunk on their outgroups and depict dissent as beyond the pale.

In other words: they overstepped. They miscalculated, from good intentions. Moderates fell in line behind Hilary Clinton and Joe Biden, while progressives tried to ban fracking and defund the police—and all these things were unpopular. They incited backlash.

So you know what else they made happen? What was ultimately produced by those 10 million people's collective efforts? The exact same catastrophe that this person cites as evidence that EA got it wrong. It produced a city like mine, Washington DC, where only 6.5% of the locals picked Trump, but he runs the place anyway.

Social change is hard as hell. It is very important, but never neglected and not very tractable—in part because it’s extremely complicated and hard to predict. Sometimes, people who devote their entire lives to it are just as lost as the rest of us. Sometimes, these people wake up one day and realize that their life's work has been completely counterproductive or canceled out. They realize that they, like us, have just been along for the ride this whole time.

That’s not to say social or systemic change is not worth trying. It’s not to say those who did try should be free of criticism for their mistakes. And it’s not to shield EA from similar scrutiny. As I noted in an earlier post, the challenges of steering political progress apply equally to efforts to reduce existential risk in the long term, and many EA efforts along those lines (like SBF and OpenAI) seem to have backfired. There are plenty of criticisms to be made of EA’s failures that are stronger than this one.¹

I only mean that as people strategize about how to do the most good with their lives, careers, or charitable donations, it is not enough to point out that a problem they might focus on is extremely important. I fear that in this person’s understandable pain, they are making an unfounded leap from "This is terrible, I didn't see it coming, and EA didn't either" to "if we had only focused on this earlier, we could have prevented or softened it." Chances are, we couldn’t—because the many people who did focus on it couldn’t either.

It is possible that the United States is about to enter a dark period of authoritarianism that could last decades, or result in violent atrocities right here at home. Also—regardless—it is possible that the single most morally important thing you can do right now is to help the global poor, or farmed animals, or work to reduce biorisks and make AI safer, et cetera. It may even be that many of us are doomed to be killed in civic violence or nuclear war no matter what we do for the next five years, but that we can nevertheless achieve more with the time we have by doing the things EA recommends.

Everyone should speak out against Trump’s abuses, and resist them with every lever of power they have access to. But there is an important distinction between society’s most important problems and the problems where your individual efforts will be most impactful at the margin. No matter how bad things get, ignoring that distinction is bad advice for those choosing careers, and encouraging it would make the world worse than it already is.

1. Although over three-quarters of EAs lean left politically, anecdotally I’ll opine that too many in the community strike me as naïvely ambivalent about Trump in particular, and the extent to which his reckless and anti-intellectual political movement is a cross-cutting risk factor exacerbating many forms of existential risk at once (to say nothing of its broader harms).