I’ve been thinking more that we may want to split up “Effective Altruism” into a few different areas. The main EA community should have an easy enough time realizing what is relevant, but this could help organize things for other communities.
People have talked about “splitting up” EA in the past to streamline things, while other people worry about how that might needlessly balkanize the community. My own past observations of trying to ‘split up’ EA, into specialized compartments, it that, more than being good or bad, it doesn’t have much consequence at all. So, I wouldn’t recommend more EAs just make an uncritical try of doing so again, if for no other reason than it strikes me as a waste of time and effort.
As mentioned in this piece, the community’s take on EA may be different from what we may want for academics. In that case one option would be to distill the main academic-friendly parts of EA into a new term in order to interface with the academic world.
The heuristic I use to think about this is to leave the management with the relationship between the EA community and “Group X”, is to let members of the EA community who are part of Group X manage EA’s relationship with Group X. That heuristic could break down in some places, but it seems to have worked okay so far for different industry groups. For EA to think of ‘academia’ as an industry like ‘the software industry’ is probably not the most accurate thing to do. I just think the heuristic fits because EAs in academia will, presumably, know how to navigate academia on behalf of EA better than the rest of us will.
I think what has worked best is for different kinds of academics in EA to lead the effort to build relationships with their respective specializations, within both the public and private sectors (there is also the non-profit sector, but that is something EA is basically built out of to begin with). To streamline this process, I’ve created different Facebook groups for networking and discussions for EAs in different respective profession/career streams, as part of a EA careers public resource sheet. It is a public resource, so please feel free to share and use it however you like.
So, I wouldn’t recommend more EAs just make an uncritical try of doing so again, if for no other reason than it strikes me as a waste of time and effort.
I could imagine that making a spin-off could be pretty simple. It could take a lot of time and effort to keep all the parts integrated. While this may not have been worth it yet, if there were a time that others in the future would estimate the costs as being high to keeping things uniform, spin-offs seem pretty reasonable to me.
The heuristic I use to think about this is to leave the management with the relationship between the EA community and “Group X”, is to let members of the EA community who are part of Group X manage EA’s relationship with Group X.
I in general agree, though I could imagine many situations where people from CEA or similar may want to be involved somewhat to make sure things don’t go wrong.
In this case, I’d assume that William MacAskill is in a really good position to appeal to much of academia. I didn’t mean “absolutely all” of academia before, sorry if that wasn’t clear.
People have talked about “splitting up” EA in the past to streamline things, while other people worry about how that might needlessly balkanize the community. My own past observations of trying to ‘split up’ EA, into specialized compartments, it that, more than being good or bad, it doesn’t have much consequence at all. So, I wouldn’t recommend more EAs just make an uncritical try of doing so again, if for no other reason than it strikes me as a waste of time and effort.
The heuristic I use to think about this is to leave the management with the relationship between the EA community and “Group X”, is to let members of the EA community who are part of Group X manage EA’s relationship with Group X. That heuristic could break down in some places, but it seems to have worked okay so far for different industry groups. For EA to think of ‘academia’ as an industry like ‘the software industry’ is probably not the most accurate thing to do. I just think the heuristic fits because EAs in academia will, presumably, know how to navigate academia on behalf of EA better than the rest of us will.
I think what has worked best is for different kinds of academics in EA to lead the effort to build relationships with their respective specializations, within both the public and private sectors (there is also the non-profit sector, but that is something EA is basically built out of to begin with). To streamline this process, I’ve created different Facebook groups for networking and discussions for EAs in different respective profession/career streams, as part of a EA careers public resource sheet. It is a public resource, so please feel free to share and use it however you like.
I could imagine that making a spin-off could be pretty simple. It could take a lot of time and effort to keep all the parts integrated. While this may not have been worth it yet, if there were a time that others in the future would estimate the costs as being high to keeping things uniform, spin-offs seem pretty reasonable to me.
I in general agree, though I could imagine many situations where people from CEA or similar may want to be involved somewhat to make sure things don’t go wrong.
In this case, I’d assume that William MacAskill is in a really good position to appeal to much of academia. I didn’t mean “absolutely all” of academia before, sorry if that wasn’t clear.
Thanks for the spreadsheet by the way. How have those groups been going? It seems like an interesting project.