One of my favourite novels from this century is Idlewild by James Frankie Thomas. The novel is a long reflection on the relationship between two queer teenagers, Fay and Nell, during their troubled years at a Quaker school called Idlewild in New York City and the particular impacts of the 9/11 attacks on the students’ psyche.

Early in the novel, while a single character narrates the plot, the character refers to themselves in the first-person plural — when Nell is narrating, she says not “I” and “me” but “We the F&N unit”. The point is to convey the psychological (and subtly unhealthy) co-dependence of Fay and Nell at this stage in their lives:

The point, though, is that there must, mathematically speaking, be twenty gay Idlewilders among us. We the F&N unit count ourselves as one single gay unit, which leaves us with nineteen probable homosexuals in the Upper School…

Since I read this novel a couple of years ago, I’ve found myself returning to many aspects of the story. Strangely, the turn of phrase “we the F&N unit” captures something specific that I’ve been contemplating at work.

In the effective altruism community, it is common for people to think in the following terms: “I want to use my career/money/resources to do the most good in the world.” This is a deeply worthy calling.

But I think one aspect of how the EA community conceptualizes this aspiration is misguided. The phrase is often translated into concepts like “At what organization can I have the greatest impact?”, or “How many lives will I save if I take career path A rather than career path B?”.

Recently, as I’ve been reflecting on which animal advocacy projects on which I want to focus my efforts, my managers have said things like “I’m not sure if you’ll have the biggest impact at our organization, since you could plausibly have a greater impact at this other organization.” That is, my managers start talking about my counterfactuals — the impact that I can have if I take some path rather than some other path. This quickly degenerates into a game of four-dimensional chess. (Some attempts to model individual impact have even invoked the economic concept of Shapley values.)

I don’t think that the question is that deep. To be sure, it is very challenging to have impact in the world, and discerning impactful vs non-impactful projects is a serious empirical and philosophical challenge.

No one person has impact in a vacuum — I think we’d all agree on that. To help a chicken in Nigeria, you need the following ingredients:

  • A lobbyist to ask policymakers to improve chicken welfare policy
  • An organization of people to support that lobbyist, e.g., via operations, communications, bookkeeping, and other tasks important for keeping any project running smoothly
  • A grantmaker to fund the organization
  • A tech billionaire to endow the grantmaker with money to give away in the first place
  • A philosopher to publish a book that convinces the lobbyist to enter animal advocacy in the first place
  • A functional Nigerian government regulation and enforcement system
  • and so on.

Is that lobbyist having impact? Maybe.

But I think that, even if this project does help the chicken, the more realistic assessment is that the impact is an emergent characteristic of the community as a whole.

To me, the question is not the fine-grained “which individual choice will enable me to save the most lives?” but the coarse-grained “which projects seem like promising avenues to saving lives in an impactful and cost-effective, and where exactly can I slot in as a valuable component of those projects?”

As I wrote in a previous article, I have been “shifting from a mindset of individual action (taking the individual actions that do the most good) to the organization and movement level (supporting larger units to take collective actions that do the most good). I’ve been contemplating this for a few years, and recently discussed this idea with someone from [The Humane League]: it’s reasonable to measure impact at the level of an org, but probably not any finer-detail than that (e.g., impact of each individual employee).”

In short, there are many inspiring projects happening in the world — there are many organizations helping projects to deliver impact in people’s lives in a cost-effective way. These organizations exist at many points in the ecosystem — from funding, to movement building, to operations, to research, to direct work. To do any good in the world, we need all of these elements — and when all the elements are in place and working smoothly, impact for people and animals emerges from this complex system (and when some elements are poorly designed, there is no impact — which is why it’s important to keep organizations and people in the advocacy space accountable for their decisions and operations).

Under this view, we can point to examples of impact arising from the community — and doing genuine good in the lives of people and animals — but individual impact does not exist as a quantity that can be measured. There really is no “Fay” and no “Nell”, but only “We the F&N unit”.

Further reading: