I agree that in practice x-risk involves different types of work and people than e.g. global poverty or animal welfare. I also agree that there is a danger of x-risk / long-termism cannibalizing the rest of the movement, and this might easily lead to bad-on-net things like effectively trading large amounts of non-x-risk work for very little x-risk / long-termist work (because the x-risk people would have done found their work anyway had x-risk been a smaller fraction of the movement, but as a consequence of x-risk preeminence a lot of other people are not sufficiently attracted to even start engaging with EA ideas).
However, I worry about something like intellectual honesty. Effective Altruism, both the term and the concept, are about effective forms of helping other people, and lots of people keep coming to the conclusion that preventing x-risks is one of the best ways of doing so. It seems almost intellectually dishonest to try to cut off or “hide” (in the weak sense of reducing the public salience of) the connection. One of the main strengths of EA is that it keeps pursuing that whole “impartial welfarist good” thing even if it leads to weird places, and I think EA should be open about the fact that it seems weird things follow from trying to do charity rigorously.
I think ideally this looks like global poverty, animal welfare, x-risk, and other cause areas all sitting under the EA umbrella, and engaged EAs in all of these areas being aware that the other causes are also things that people following EA principles have been drawn towards (and therefore prompted to weigh them against each other in their own decisions and cause prioritization). Of course this also requires that one cause area does not monopolize the EA image.
I agree with your concern about the combination seeming incongruous, but I think there are good ways to pitch this while tying them all into core EA ideas, e.g. something like:
If you start thinking quantitatively about how to do the most good, you might realize that some especially promising ways of doing good are are cases where
-there is clear evidence that a small amount of money goes far, like helping extremely poor people in developing countries
-some suffering has clearly not historically been taken into account, like animal welfare
-the stakes are absolutely huge, like plausible catastrophes that might affect the entire world
I think you also overestimate the cultural congruence between non-x-risk causes like, for example, global poverty and animal welfare. These concerns span from hard-nosed veteran economists who think everything vegan is hippy nonsense and only people matter morally, to young non-technical vegans with concern for everything right down to worms. Grouping these causes together only looks normal because you’re so used to EA.
(likewise, I expect low weirdness gradients between x-risk and non-x-risk causes, e.g. nuclear risk reduction policy and developing-country economic development, or GCBRs and neglected diseases)
I agree that in practice x-risk involves different types of work and people than e.g. global poverty or animal welfare. I also agree that there is a danger of x-risk / long-termism cannibalizing the rest of the movement, and this might easily lead to bad-on-net things like effectively trading large amounts of non-x-risk work for very little x-risk / long-termist work (because the x-risk people would have done found their work anyway had x-risk been a smaller fraction of the movement, but as a consequence of x-risk preeminence a lot of other people are not sufficiently attracted to even start engaging with EA ideas).
However, I worry about something like intellectual honesty. Effective Altruism, both the term and the concept, are about effective forms of helping other people, and lots of people keep coming to the conclusion that preventing x-risks is one of the best ways of doing so. It seems almost intellectually dishonest to try to cut off or “hide” (in the weak sense of reducing the public salience of) the connection. One of the main strengths of EA is that it keeps pursuing that whole “impartial welfarist good” thing even if it leads to weird places, and I think EA should be open about the fact that it seems weird things follow from trying to do charity rigorously.
I think ideally this looks like global poverty, animal welfare, x-risk, and other cause areas all sitting under the EA umbrella, and engaged EAs in all of these areas being aware that the other causes are also things that people following EA principles have been drawn towards (and therefore prompted to weigh them against each other in their own decisions and cause prioritization). Of course this also requires that one cause area does not monopolize the EA image.
I agree with your concern about the combination seeming incongruous, but I think there are good ways to pitch this while tying them all into core EA ideas, e.g. something like:
I think you also overestimate the cultural congruence between non-x-risk causes like, for example, global poverty and animal welfare. These concerns span from hard-nosed veteran economists who think everything vegan is hippy nonsense and only people matter morally, to young non-technical vegans with concern for everything right down to worms. Grouping these causes together only looks normal because you’re so used to EA.
(likewise, I expect low weirdness gradients between x-risk and non-x-risk causes, e.g. nuclear risk reduction policy and developing-country economic development, or GCBRs and neglected diseases)