Thinking along these lines, joining the Effective Altruism movement can be seen as a way to “get in at the ground floor”: if the movement is eventually successful in changing the status quo, you will get brownie points for having been right all along, and the Effective Altruist area you’ve built a career in will get a large prestige boost when everyone agrees that it is indeed effectively altruistic.
Joining EA seems like a very suboptimal way to get brownie points from society at large and even from groups which EA represents the best (students/graduates of elite colleges). Isn’t getting into social justice a better investment? What are the subgroups you think EAs try hard to impress?
I guess I’m saying that getting into social justice is more like “instant gratification”, and joining EA is more like “playing the long game” / “taking relative pain now for a huge payoff later”.
Also / alternatively, maybe getting into social justice is impressing one group of people but making another group of people massively dislike you (and making a lot of people shrug their shoulders), whereas when the correctness of EA is known to all, having got in early will lead to brownie points from everyone.
So maybe the subgroup is “most people at some future time” or something?
(hopefully it’s clear, but I’m ~trying to argue from the point of view of the post; I think this is fun to think about but I’m not sure how much I really believe it)
Joining EA seems like a very suboptimal way to get brownie points from society at large and even from groups which EA represents the best (students/graduates of elite colleges). Isn’t getting into social justice a better investment? What are the subgroups you think EAs try hard to impress?
I guess I’m saying that getting into social justice is more like “instant gratification”, and joining EA is more like “playing the long game” / “taking relative pain now for a huge payoff later”.
Also / alternatively, maybe getting into social justice is impressing one group of people but making another group of people massively dislike you (and making a lot of people shrug their shoulders), whereas when the correctness of EA is known to all, having got in early will lead to brownie points from everyone.
So maybe the subgroup is “most people at some future time” or something?
(hopefully it’s clear, but I’m ~trying to argue from the point of view of the post; I think this is fun to think about but I’m not sure how much I really believe it)