I’ve been interested in EA & adjacent stuff for about a year now (i.e. well after FTX). The first time I attended an in-person meetup, I said I will “never call myself an EA or rationalist publicly”, but I’m not sure that this post completely addresses why, so I want to give my reasoning.
In my view, effective altruism, and other idea-communities like religions or political ideologies, consist of both the ideas and methods, and the broader culture of the community. For example, writing long blog posts isn’t an intrinsically EA thing to do, and publishing video essays on YouTube isn’t an intrinsically leftist thing to do, but EAs culturally like blog posts while leftists culturally like video essays. I think conflictaverse’s notion of brand confusion is related to this.
To outsiders, I think the cultural aspects of a community come to mind much more than the ideas. This relates to the section on not understanding how words work, in that defining effective altruism as [The things done and believed by] “those folks who go to EA conferences and write on the thing called the EA Forum, whoever they are.” includes a lot of stuff that isn’t technically EA.
Finally then, despite agreeing with many of the core principles of EA and other idea-communities, I refuse to identify with any of these labels as I don’t associate with the broader community. If I say “I am an effective altruist”, I expect people to think “this guy reads a lot of blog posts and probably works in tech or finance” and not “this guy thinks uses decision-theoretic approaches to decide how to allocate charitable resources”. Since that’s not what I meant, it’s not effective communication, and so I avoid it.
I’ve been interested in EA & adjacent stuff for about a year now (i.e. well after FTX). The first time I attended an in-person meetup, I said I will “never call myself an EA or rationalist publicly”, but I’m not sure that this post completely addresses why, so I want to give my reasoning.
In my view, effective altruism, and other idea-communities like religions or political ideologies, consist of both the ideas and methods, and the broader culture of the community. For example, writing long blog posts isn’t an intrinsically EA thing to do, and publishing video essays on YouTube isn’t an intrinsically leftist thing to do, but EAs culturally like blog posts while leftists culturally like video essays. I think conflictaverse’s notion of brand confusion is related to this.
To outsiders, I think the cultural aspects of a community come to mind much more than the ideas. This relates to the section on not understanding how words work, in that defining effective altruism as [The things done and believed by] “those folks who go to EA conferences and write on the thing called the EA Forum, whoever they are.” includes a lot of stuff that isn’t technically EA.
Finally then, despite agreeing with many of the core principles of EA and other idea-communities, I refuse to identify with any of these labels as I don’t associate with the broader community. If I say “I am an effective altruist”, I expect people to think “this guy reads a lot of blog posts and probably works in tech or finance” and not “this guy thinks uses decision-theoretic approaches to decide how to allocate charitable resources”. Since that’s not what I meant, it’s not effective communication, and so I avoid it.