Thank you for putting this together, I strongly agree with many of these points, especially the point of independent thinking.
I think the strength of this post’s argument varies when taking into account different “services” that the EA movement can provide individuals. For instance, for someone in their mid-career who is interested in EA in order to rethink their career path, there would be much more value in a more divergent EA movement that is focused on the EA toolkit. Yet, that wouldn’t be the same for someone who looks for donation advice, for which we’d rather put much more focus on very few cause areas and donation opportunities.
That might also be true for someone in their early career who looks for career advice, but that would depend on how much independent thinking they’re willing to do, because I strongly agree that this is missing. I’ll add a quote from a Q&A with Will MacAskill ( Aug 2020) supporting that:
Habiba: … “What mistakes do you think most EAs, or people in the effective altruism community, are making?”
Will: …”more people should just be of the mind that they want to figure out the basics, not take anything for granted, and not defer to [others’ opinions]. At the moment, I think there’s a very small number of people doing that, even though I regard it as the core of what EA is about.”
I’m personally quite worried that the EA movement would end up filled with people who are fans of a certain cause area without being neutral about their cause. EA shouldn’t be about cheering for certain cause areas, it should be about prioritizing opportunities to do good, and not communicating this good enough internally and externally could be very dangerous for the movement in the long term and would make us miss a lot of our potential.
I’ve noticed that there are quite a few downvotes for this post, and not enough criticizing comments. I’d be happy to hear others’ opinions on this subject!
I’m adding another suggestion to the list: I think that instead of removing emphasis from the movement’s top causes, we might want to put an equal emphasis on the EA toolkit.
I believe that if you would ask all highly active EAs “what tools do EAs use in order to prioritize opportunities to do good?” you’d get very different answers, while I would hope that everyone could easily be able to recall a closed set of actionable guiding principles.
Thank you for putting this together, I strongly agree with many of these points, especially the point of independent thinking.
I think the strength of this post’s argument varies when taking into account different “services” that the EA movement can provide individuals. For instance, for someone in their mid-career who is interested in EA in order to rethink their career path, there would be much more value in a more divergent EA movement that is focused on the EA toolkit.
Yet, that wouldn’t be the same for someone who looks for donation advice, for which we’d rather put much more focus on very few cause areas and donation opportunities.
That might also be true for someone in their early career who looks for career advice, but that would depend on how much independent thinking they’re willing to do, because I strongly agree that this is missing. I’ll add a quote from a Q&A with Will MacAskill ( Aug 2020) supporting that:
I’m personally quite worried that the EA movement would end up filled with people who are fans of a certain cause area without being neutral about their cause. EA shouldn’t be about cheering for certain cause areas, it should be about prioritizing opportunities to do good, and not communicating this good enough internally and externally could be very dangerous for the movement in the long term and would make us miss a lot of our potential.
I’ve noticed that there are quite a few downvotes for this post, and not enough criticizing comments. I’d be happy to hear others’ opinions on this subject!
I’m adding another suggestion to the list: I think that instead of removing emphasis from the movement’s top causes, we might want to put an equal emphasis on the EA toolkit.
I believe that if you would ask all highly active EAs “what tools do EAs use in order to prioritize opportunities to do good?” you’d get very different answers, while I would hope that everyone could easily be able to recall a closed set of actionable guiding principles.