I am not currently a GWWC member, but I intend to join in the future. This change wouldn’t have a large effect on me either way, but I would support it.
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). When I first became familiar with GiveWell, my initial reaction was that they were missing the big picture. The OPP has been a big positive for me because it addresses areas that could have massive impact, even if there is more uncertainty and attributing direct impact is difficult. I have also noticed 80,000 Hours broaden its message and career recommendations over the past year from mainly focusing on earning to give, to acknowledging that a high risk, high reward career with direct impact might also be a reasonable choice for certain people.
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). I think the EA community will incorporate more ideas from development economics and x-risk over the coming years, and that this is a good thing.
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.
I am not currently a GWWC member, but I intend to join in the future. This change wouldn’t have a large effect on me either way, but I would support it.
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). When I first became familiar with GiveWell, my initial reaction was that they were missing the big picture. The OPP has been a big positive for me because it addresses areas that could have massive impact, even if there is more uncertainty and attributing direct impact is difficult. I have also noticed 80,000 Hours broaden its message and career recommendations over the past year from mainly focusing on earning to give, to acknowledging that a high risk, high reward career with direct impact might also be a reasonable choice for certain people.
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). I think the EA community will incorporate more ideas from development economics and x-risk over the coming years, and that this is a good thing.
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.