Tracking Philosophical Impact

An awkward ask, but feedback here would be very helpful!

The Problem

It’s very hard to estimate the impact of my work (both academic and public-philosophical). This leads to practical difficulties: When I applied for a grant last year, the funders wondered whether there was any evidence of positive impact resulting from my work to date. And, to be fair, I wonder the same thing myself! I can imagine some possible pathways by which I hope my work will do good:

• I hope my blogging and other public philosophy convinces more people of the moral case for prioritizing beneficence, and even motivates some to act upon this, e.g. via effective donations and/or working on important causes, to a greater extent than they otherwise would have.

• I hope utilitarianism.net proves a useful and widely-used teaching resource, helping students to better understand utilitarian theory and its practical recommendations (and again, maybe motivate some valuable actions). I especially hope I’m able to help people to better distinguish utilitarianism from naive instrumentalism.

• And I hope my original research (best explained here, here, and here), in addition to whatever intellectual merits it may have, also helps to improve the academic reputation of utilitarianism. I know a lot of philosophers think it’s a hopelessly crude and repugnant theory.¹ But I doubt many would (or reasonably could) think that about my work (if they read it). So I have vague hopes for a long-term pathway to impact that looks something like: more attention to my work ⇒ greater academic respect for utilitarianism ⇒ more moral attention given to reasons of beneficence. (“The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next,” and all that.)

That’s obviously all super-speculative. It could easily come to naught fairly little.² But they aren’t unreasonable hopes³—given the potential upside, I think funders could well find my work worth supporting as part of a “hits-based” portfolio. After all, even small-scale beneficentric persuasion can have immense impact,⁴ and larger influence is far from impossible.⁵ It’s just hard to get concrete evidence (either way) about whether I’m on track to achieve these goals. Occasionally people privately say positive things about my work,⁶ which is certainly nice to hear—especially from my deontologist colleagues, since that may be some evidence of early success along pathway #3. But it remains overall very hard to know. (Especially since I assume the default outcome for academic work is to have very little impact.)

Philosophical impact?

A Partial Solution?

I suspect it’s mostly impossible to track philosophical impact of the sort I’m after (at least in its early stages). But one thing that could provide a sort of “lower bound” would be testimonial evidence / anecdotes from some who have been personally influenced by my work in some way. It’s an awkward thing to ask for,⁷ but I would greatly appreciate it if anyone reading this who has been personally influenced by my work could leave a brief comment on this post indicating how.

Examples of the kind of influence I’d be especially interested to hear about include:

• Getting more (or, lamentably, less) involved in beneficent projects (e.g. EA work or donations) as a result of my writing.

• Assigning my work in your teaching, especially if it seemed to make a difference to how students ended up perceiving or engaging with the topic(s).

• Feeling less (or, lamentably, more) dismissive of utilitarianism and associated ideas as a result of my work. (Becoming positively convinced to change one’s mind on significant points would be especially delightful, if that ever happens!)

If you have such first-hand knowledge of my work having some (positive or negative) impact, briefly sharing the details below could change the likelihood (upwards or downwards, respectively) that I pursue and receive grant funding in future, to have more time to focus on this work. I only want to pursue such funding if the supported work really is positive in prospect.⁸ So, it would be immensely helpful to have some evidence here, however limited.⁹

(For those who have not observed any concrete impact along these lines—positive or negative—from my work, but nonetheless feel vaguely supportive, feel free to just ‘like’ this post.)

Setting expectations: I’d guess that the most likely result of a post like this is to get no response (probably why academics usually don’t ask!). E.g., even if some students are very positively influenced by utilitarianism.net, it seems unlikely that they will see this post. So it is very much a “lower bound” rather than a true “sample” of potential impact. Still, even if nobody initially responds, there’s a chance that I might be able to gradually build up a bit of a testimonial record over time. Worth a shot, I figure. (E.g., all it would take is one reader to have taken the🔸10% pledge as a result of my work to make it instantly high-impact!)

1. I even kinda sympathize with some of their complaints about the utilitarian tradition, but nonetheless argue that much about the standard caricature of utilitarianism is misleading.

2. It would be surprising if all my EA advocacy didn’t lead to any more effective-altruist behavior from literally anyone at all.

3. Relatedly: my favorite class to teach is on effective altruism, and after class one day a student shared with me their thought: “You know, your teaching must do an extraordinary amount of good. I mean, you probably inspire at least a few students each year to really change their lives in significant ways—like donating to effective charities after they graduate. Think how much it all adds up to!” Alas, it’s very hard to know whether a class actually has any lasting effect (and of course my aim in teaching is to critically explore the ideas, not to convince anyone of anything in particular). But another student from that same class ended up raising $10,000 for the Against Malaria Foundation that summer, which was really nice to hear!

(Matt Wage may be another student influenced by my teaching—I was his graduate TA for Peter Singer’s class that got him excited about effective giving, though I can’t say whether his trajectory would have been any different with another TA. He did once complain (in good humor) that I gave him a “very misleading impression” of philosophy, that his subsequent classes at Princeton failed to live up to!)

4. Consider, e.g., the value of convincing just one additional person to take the Giving What We Can 10% pledge. That’s a lot of extra lives saved, in expectation! In general, “EA community building” seems an incredibly high-upside sort of activity, for anyone who is generally competent at it (that is, more likely to succeed than to prove counterproductive at communicating effective altruist motivations and ideas).

5. As demonstrated by the likes of Peter Singer, Toby Ord, and Will MacAskill, whose collective works have plausibly influenced billions of dollars in donations, resulting in millions more QALYs for existing people, before even considering the potential benefits to non-human animals and future generations. (Of course, it doesn’t follow from this that whoever hopes for significant philosophical influence thereby has a realistic shot at it. For it to be worth funding, you’d need to think my work had distinctive qualities. But see, e.g., Peter Singer’s endorsement, as flagged in the following footnote.)

6. The nicest public endorsement I’ve received was the shout-out from Peter Singer, in his Conversation with Tyler, in answer to Cowen’s question “Who’s an underrated philosopher that we should be reading more, talking about more, thinking about more?… Say someone active today, whose work you admire.”

7. Though I’m encouraged by Bryan Caplan’s similar request, ‘What Have I Ever Done For You?’

8. And, ideally, more positive than the next-best marginal grant (for EA community building or whatever it may be)—though I’m happy to leave that for the grant-makers to judge!

9. As an added bonus, if the feedback turns out to be mostly positive, it’s the sort of thing that I could read over when needed to cheer myself up a bit. (I love academia, but one downside is that it tends to involve disproportionately negative feedback.)