Yeah, this is a problem in gauging the majority opinions of effective altruists on anything. The best assessment of that for real will come out with the results of the 2014 effective altruism survey, which are being processed now. Even still, though, issues like this are still too new, specific, and narrow within effective altruism for a reliable record of consensus to be known. The issue is that the people who post, or comment, regularly in the Facebook group select themselves to be people who have fun discussing conundrums in giant forums. I am like this. Notice how I am commenting on everything, rather than spending my time earning more money, and then giving it away.
I would estimate that only 10% of effective altruists regularly discuss it on social media, and I don’t believe the few major perspectives put forward in any one discussion thread can be reliably thought of as representative of all positions effective altruists might take on that discussion. I believe to curb this issue is the reason, in part, this forum was started.
Yeah, this is a problem in gauging the majority opinions of effective altruists on anything. The best assessment of that for real will come out with the results of the 2014 effective altruism survey, which are being processed now. Even still, though, issues like this are still too new, specific, and narrow within effective altruism for a reliable record of consensus to be known. The issue is that the people who post, or comment, regularly in the Facebook group select themselves to be people who have fun discussing conundrums in giant forums. I am like this. Notice how I am commenting on everything, rather than spending my time earning more money, and then giving it away.
I would estimate that only 10% of effective altruists regularly discuss it on social media, and I don’t believe the few major perspectives put forward in any one discussion thread can be reliably thought of as representative of all positions effective altruists might take on that discussion. I believe to curb this issue is the reason, in part, this forum was started.