Effective Altruists want to effectively help others. I think it makes perfect sense for this to be an umbrella movement that includes a range of different cause areas. (And literally saving the world is obviously a legitimate area of interest for altruists!)
Cause-specific movements are great, but they arenāt a replacement for EA as a cause-neutral movement to effectively do good.
The claim isnāt that the current framing of all these cause areas as effective altruism doesnāt make any sense, but that itās confusing and sub-optimal. According to Matt Yglesias, there are already ārelevant peopleā who agree strongly enough with this that theyāre trying to drop to just using the acronym EAābut I think thatās a poor solution and I hadnāt seen those concerns explained in full anywhere.
As multiplerecentposts have said, EAs today try to sell the obvious important and important idea of preventing existential risk using counterintuitive ideas about caring about the far future, which most people wonāt buy. This is an example of how viewing these cause areas through just the lens of altruism can be damaging to those causes.
And then it damages the global poverty and animal welfare cause areas because many who might be interested in the EA ideas to do good better there get turned off by EAās intense focus on longtermism.
A phrase that I really like to describe longtermism is āaltruistic rationaltyā which covers activities that are a subset of āeffective altruismā
Effective Altruists want to effectively help others. I think it makes perfect sense for this to be an umbrella movement that includes a range of different cause areas. (And literally saving the world is obviously a legitimate area of interest for altruists!)
Cause-specific movements are great, but they arenāt a replacement for EA as a cause-neutral movement to effectively do good.
The claim isnāt that the current framing of all these cause areas as effective altruism doesnāt make any sense, but that itās confusing and sub-optimal. According to Matt Yglesias, there are already ārelevant peopleā who agree strongly enough with this that theyāre trying to drop to just using the acronym EAābut I think thatās a poor solution and I hadnāt seen those concerns explained in full anywhere.
As multiple recent posts have said, EAs today try to sell the obvious important and important idea of preventing existential risk using counterintuitive ideas about caring about the far future, which most people wonāt buy. This is an example of how viewing these cause areas through just the lens of altruism can be damaging to those causes.
And then it damages the global poverty and animal welfare cause areas because many who might be interested in the EA ideas to do good better there get turned off by EAās intense focus on longtermism.
A phrase that I really like to describe longtermism is āaltruistic rationaltyā which covers activities that are a subset of āeffective altruismā