An influential essay arguing EA should be wary of pivoting from concrete charity ('man vs nature': universally-agreed-good) to political 'systemic change' ('man vs man': zero-sum, contested). Part I is a tour-de-force Bob/Alice dialogue: EA political donations don't cancel out (EAs skew one way); an 'efficient market hypothesis for politics' (smart people can't reliably beat the political consensus); the historical track record of smart systemic-changers is terrible (1920s USSR-boosters, eugenics, Engels-as-effective-altruist funding Marx → global mass murder); quantifiability/streetlight bias favors the measurable side. Part II: man-vs-man politics would tear the movement apart (the vegetarian-lunch scandal; open-borders memes alienating recruits) and dissolve EA's precious unified moral message ('NO! BED NETS!') into a Brookings clone.

Quality 79 · Excellent. Excellent: a canonical, frequently-cited EA essay with a masterful steelmanning dialogue and several portable arguments (efficient-market-for-politics, Engels-net-negative, quantifiability bias, movement cohesion); held just below the higher classics because Scott himself hedges Part I in the epistemic-status edit. 79.

Claude’s paradigm shift 60 · Notable shift. Strongly original arguments (efficient-market-for-politics; Engels-net-negative) that shaped the EA-and-politics discourse. B60.

Real-world impact 3 · Moderate. A load-bearing, widely-cited text in the EA-vs-politics debate that genuinely shaped the movement's stance; discourse-level real-world impact. RWI3.

Beware Systemic Change