I have watched the EA movement evolve over the last few years, and it seems to be broadening its scope. This has been especially evident at with GiveWell’s Open Philanthropy Project (OPP).
This may be a semantic question about what you class under EA, but the scope’s always seemed pretty broad—with LessWrong and MIRI big, and GiveWell considering areas other than poverty, before GWWC. GWWC slotted in as the poverty pledge organisation, but that didn’t constrain the scope of EA. To that extent I don’t think the following is quite right, because GWWC doesn’t define the whole EA movement, and the movement already has plenty of visible advocates of other causes:
This broadening of scope is essential because it includes people who initially feel the movement is missing the bigger picture (even if they change their minds later).
Yeah, reading some of the other comments on here leads me to think I might have a misconception of what EA includes, or how others define EA. This may be because I come from the global health/ development economics side of things. I wasn’t really sure what LessWrong or MIRI were for a long time, or how they related to the EA community. It might be pretty common for people to have an incomplete picture of what EA is depending on the intellectual route they took to get here. So even if the movement is more broad and inclusive, the public perception of the movement may turn people away.
Also, when I say “missing the bigger picture” I am not solely referring to x-risk, but also to approaches to global health and poverty reduction like R&D for infectious disease, infrastructure development, improving the business environment and generally trying to work around the edges of an economy to address market failures. It seems to me that there was a gap within the EA community for these types of solutions before the OPP, unless you include J-PAL and IPA.
Some of what I’m saying may not be specifically relevant to the above GWWC wording change, but reflect broader changes in the EA movement (or my understanding of it) that I am happy to see.
Note that you could certainly include contributions to R&D for infectious diseases as part of the existing GWWC pledge. GWWC doesn’t have any recommendations in that area, but we certainly see it as a plausibly very effective way of helping. The same is presumably true of your other examples. Anything J-PAL or IPA promote as effective is probably well worth looking into. I personally donate to both J-PAL and IPA themselves.
This may be a semantic question about what you class under EA, but the scope’s always seemed pretty broad—with LessWrong and MIRI big, and GiveWell considering areas other than poverty, before GWWC. GWWC slotted in as the poverty pledge organisation, but that didn’t constrain the scope of EA. To that extent I don’t think the following is quite right, because GWWC doesn’t define the whole EA movement, and the movement already has plenty of visible advocates of other causes:
Yeah, reading some of the other comments on here leads me to think I might have a misconception of what EA includes, or how others define EA. This may be because I come from the global health/ development economics side of things. I wasn’t really sure what LessWrong or MIRI were for a long time, or how they related to the EA community. It might be pretty common for people to have an incomplete picture of what EA is depending on the intellectual route they took to get here. So even if the movement is more broad and inclusive, the public perception of the movement may turn people away.
Also, when I say “missing the bigger picture” I am not solely referring to x-risk, but also to approaches to global health and poverty reduction like R&D for infectious disease, infrastructure development, improving the business environment and generally trying to work around the edges of an economy to address market failures. It seems to me that there was a gap within the EA community for these types of solutions before the OPP, unless you include J-PAL and IPA.
Some of what I’m saying may not be specifically relevant to the above GWWC wording change, but reflect broader changes in the EA movement (or my understanding of it) that I am happy to see.
Note that you could certainly include contributions to R&D for infectious diseases as part of the existing GWWC pledge. GWWC doesn’t have any recommendations in that area, but we certainly see it as a plausibly very effective way of helping. The same is presumably true of your other examples. Anything J-PAL or IPA promote as effective is probably well worth looking into. I personally donate to both J-PAL and IPA themselves.