OK, I guess the tone of my original reply wasn’t popular (which is fair enough I guess).
The OP raised the subject of a non-trivial proportion of people perceiving EA as being a ‘phyg’ as a problem, and suggested with moderately high confidence that the transition to a “professional association” would radically reduce this. I’m not seeing this. Plenty of groups recruiting students brand themselves “movements” for “doing good” in some general way whilst being relatively unlikely to be accused of being a cult (climate change and civil/animal rights activists, fair-traders, volunteering groups etc)
And I suspect far more people would say the International Association of Scientologists and Association of Professional Independent Scientologists which both adopt the structure and optics of professional membership bodies are definitely cults (Obviously there are many more reasons to consider Scientology as a cult, but if anything I’d think the belief-system-under-a-professional-veneer approach looks more suspicious rather than less. At any rate, forming professional membership bodies definitely isn’t something actual cults don’t do)
So if people are perceiving EA as a cult it’s probably their reaction—justified or otherwise—to other things, some of which might be far too important to dispense with like Giving Pledges and concern about x-risk, and some of which might be easily avoided like reading from scripts (and yes, substituting ordinary words for insider jargon like ‘phyg’). Other ways to dispel accusations that EA is a cult (if it is indeed a problem) feels like the subject for an entirely different debate, but I’d genuinely be interested in counter-arguments from anyone who thinks I’m wrong and changing the organization structure is the key.
OK, I guess the tone of my original reply wasn’t popular (which is fair enough I guess).
The OP raised the subject of a non-trivial proportion of people perceiving EA as being a ‘phyg’ as a problem, and suggested with moderately high confidence that the transition to a “professional association” would radically reduce this. I’m not seeing this. Plenty of groups recruiting students brand themselves “movements” for “doing good” in some general way whilst being relatively unlikely to be accused of being a cult (climate change and civil/animal rights activists, fair-traders, volunteering groups etc)
And I suspect far more people would say the International Association of Scientologists and Association of Professional Independent Scientologists which both adopt the structure and optics of professional membership bodies are definitely cults (Obviously there are many more reasons to consider Scientology as a cult, but if anything I’d think the belief-system-under-a-professional-veneer approach looks more suspicious rather than less. At any rate, forming professional membership bodies definitely isn’t something actual cults don’t do)
So if people are perceiving EA as a cult it’s probably their reaction—justified or otherwise—to other things, some of which might be far too important to dispense with like Giving Pledges and concern about x-risk, and some of which might be easily avoided like reading from scripts (and yes, substituting ordinary words for insider jargon like ‘phyg’). Other ways to dispel accusations that EA is a cult (if it is indeed a problem) feels like the subject for an entirely different debate, but I’d genuinely be interested in counter-arguments from anyone who thinks I’m wrong and changing the organization structure is the key.