Thank you for posting! Many kudos for contributing to the frontpage discussion rather than lurking for years like many people (including me).
I agree with most of your assessment here. But I think rather than “simple altruism”, it would be better to focus on “altruistic intent”. Making this substitution doesn’t change much, the major differences are just that it includes EA itself, and excludes cynically motivated giving. The thing I think we care about is people trying to do good, not specifically doing non-EA things.
That said, increasing altruistic intent is, I think, included under the heading of broad longtermism. I don’t have a source for this, but my impression is that not that much work goes towards broad longtermism because it seems really hard, not that urgent, and EAs tend to be bad at the key skills involved, like persuasion and politics.
I agree! With both your points on renaming it “altruistic intent”, and the reasons behind.
I thought perhaps improving altruistic intent must be somewhere under the EA radar, but in the very superficial reading I have done to date, I had not found it. I will look more specifically now at broad longtermism. To be honest, I was also hoping the EA community had more skills in persuasion and politics, and was already working on it.
Finally, thank you for acknowledging my neophyte attempts on a front page post. It took a lot of internal debate and self-talk to write it ;)
Thank you for posting! Many kudos for contributing to the frontpage discussion rather than lurking for years like many people (including me).
I agree with most of your assessment here. But I think rather than “simple altruism”, it would be better to focus on “altruistic intent”. Making this substitution doesn’t change much, the major differences are just that it includes EA itself, and excludes cynically motivated giving. The thing I think we care about is people trying to do good, not specifically doing non-EA things.
That said, increasing altruistic intent is, I think, included under the heading of broad longtermism. I don’t have a source for this, but my impression is that not that much work goes towards broad longtermism because it seems really hard, not that urgent, and EAs tend to be bad at the key skills involved, like persuasion and politics.
I agree! With both your points on renaming it “altruistic intent”, and the reasons behind.
I thought perhaps improving altruistic intent must be somewhere under the EA radar, but in the very superficial reading I have done to date, I had not found it. I will look more specifically now at broad longtermism. To be honest, I was also hoping the EA community had more skills in persuasion and politics, and was already working on it.
Finally, thank you for acknowledging my neophyte attempts on a front page post. It took a lot of internal debate and self-talk to write it ;)