We should try to avoid calling ourselves “effective altruists”
I just realized a big factor into why we have been calling ourselves “effective altruists” is because the public Facebook group, with thousands of members who all join the group openly, and voluntarily, is called “Effective Altruists”. The Facebook group is maybe the most public landing pad for individuals new to effective altruism. Additionally, the term ‘effective altruist’ seems likely to have been generalized to other public-facing events, such as the Effective Altruism Summit. How important is it that this change, considering we might need to muster great effort to do it.
I thought the reason was that we were looking for a term to replace “super-duper hardcore people”, and settled on “effective altruists”. This predated the facebook group by a considerable time. Indeed, initially I thought the facebook group was a bad idea, as ‘EA’ was not intended to be public facing at all.
The term ‘effective altruism’ was created before the FB group, but I think Evan is referring to the fact that the FB group uses the ‘ist’ form rather than the ‘ism’ form and is the most prominent thing to do so. I think it would have been an improvement if it had used the ‘ism’ form (and it is not a co-incidence that this forum does).
I just realized a big factor into why we have been calling ourselves “effective altruists” is because the public Facebook group, with thousands of members who all join the group openly, and voluntarily, is called “Effective Altruists”. The Facebook group is maybe the most public landing pad for individuals new to effective altruism. Additionally, the term ‘effective altruist’ seems likely to have been generalized to other public-facing events, such as the Effective Altruism Summit. How important is it that this change, considering we might need to muster great effort to do it.
I thought the reason was that we were looking for a term to replace “super-duper hardcore people”, and settled on “effective altruists”. This predated the facebook group by a considerable time. Indeed, initially I thought the facebook group was a bad idea, as ‘EA’ was not intended to be public facing at all.
The term ‘effective altruism’ was created before the FB group, but I think Evan is referring to the fact that the FB group uses the ‘ist’ form rather than the ‘ism’ form and is the most prominent thing to do so. I think it would have been an improvement if it had used the ‘ism’ form (and it is not a co-incidence that this forum does).
I’m pretty confident Will used the ‘ist’ form in conversation with me.