Maybe I am missing something here, but—given your post and your arguments—how does it follow that the EA movement should not endorse case-specific effective altruism?
If I understand the “EA mission” correctly, it is about doing the most good in total. The original poster seems to believe that EA endorsing case-specific effective altruism will do more good than if they don’t (overall). Hence, if you disagree, you should argue why it would be better for EA to not endorse this. Where am I making a mistake in this logic?
My own intuition (which I tried to hint at in my first post) is that any official endorsement of case-specific effective altruism on behalf of EA would take away too much from the core of EA to be worth it. YES, the world would be better, if everyone applied the EA core values to their own field, BUT ressources are too tight—or it might be too distracting -- to devote any attention to such “secondary” causes. (That being said, I am very much aware that my intuition might be wrong!)
What does it mean for the EA movement to endorse something? If that just means that I should say cause-specific effective altruism is a good thing, then okay, I hereby declare that cause-specific effective altruism is a good thing. But if you mean that I should spend my limited time campaigning to convince people in causes like the arts to focus on more effective interventions within their own cause, then I think it’s pretty clear that I should not do that.
Michael, I’ll clarify what actions from the EA community I am specifically I am making a case for. I am arguing two things:
1) people who are already invested in EA outreach ought to consider strategies that reach and activate people invested in specific domains; and
2) people who are invested in EA in general, but not in EA outreach specifically, ought to recognize the value of 1).
Now, those “ought tos” are of course contingent upon your agreement with the specific arguments and assumptions that I lay out in the piece. But I am not trying to convince you, specifically, to campaign for domain-specific EA except to the extent that you’re campaigning for EA already and not 100% successful in those efforts.
Maybe I am missing something here, but—given your post and your arguments—how does it follow that the EA movement should not endorse case-specific effective altruism?
If I understand the “EA mission” correctly, it is about doing the most good in total. The original poster seems to believe that EA endorsing case-specific effective altruism will do more good than if they don’t (overall). Hence, if you disagree, you should argue why it would be better for EA to not endorse this. Where am I making a mistake in this logic?
My own intuition (which I tried to hint at in my first post) is that any official endorsement of case-specific effective altruism on behalf of EA would take away too much from the core of EA to be worth it. YES, the world would be better, if everyone applied the EA core values to their own field, BUT ressources are too tight—or it might be too distracting -- to devote any attention to such “secondary” causes. (That being said, I am very much aware that my intuition might be wrong!)
What does it mean for the EA movement to endorse something? If that just means that I should say cause-specific effective altruism is a good thing, then okay, I hereby declare that cause-specific effective altruism is a good thing. But if you mean that I should spend my limited time campaigning to convince people in causes like the arts to focus on more effective interventions within their own cause, then I think it’s pretty clear that I should not do that.
Michael, I’ll clarify what actions from the EA community I am specifically I am making a case for. I am arguing two things:
1) people who are already invested in EA outreach ought to consider strategies that reach and activate people invested in specific domains; and
2) people who are invested in EA in general, but not in EA outreach specifically, ought to recognize the value of 1).
Now, those “ought tos” are of course contingent upon your agreement with the specific arguments and assumptions that I lay out in the piece. But I am not trying to convince you, specifically, to campaign for domain-specific EA except to the extent that you’re campaigning for EA already and not 100% successful in those efforts.