Yeah. Effective Altruism isn’t a profession, and nothing would scream “cult” more than trying to rebrand as a professional organization primarily to try to convince people it isn’t a cult! (Not even unnecessary use of ingroup jargon like the LessWrongish ROT13ing of the word into “phyg”!) Even more so if like most actual professional organizations, people were assigned compulsory training and CPD and sanctioned for deviating from the official position. The “cult” impressions/accusations are nothing to do with lack of formal membership structure, so introducing one won’t make them go away. Scientology has “professional organizations”.
Also agree there’s possibly more scope for actual professional organizations in some specific areas (e.g charity founders, grantmakers and AI safety professionals), but more for potential opportunities to share knowledge with other people working in the field outside EA than as a rebranding exercise.
Yeah. Effective Altruism isn’t a profession, and nothing would scream “cult” more than trying to rebrand as a professional organization primarily to try to convince people it isn’t a cult! (Not even unnecessary use of ingroup jargon like the LessWrongish ROT13ing of the word into “phyg”!) Even more so if like most actual professional organizations, people were assigned compulsory training and CPD and sanctioned for deviating from the official position. The “cult” impressions/accusations are nothing to do with lack of formal membership structure, so introducing one won’t make them go away. Scientology has “professional organizations”.
Also agree there’s possibly more scope for actual professional organizations in some specific areas (e.g charity founders, grantmakers and AI safety professionals), but more for potential opportunities to share knowledge with other people working in the field outside EA than as a rebranding exercise.