I’ve updated the title, but to those of you who had a problem with me asserting that engaging publicly with Give Directly qualifies someone as an EA, what criteria do you think is required for someone/something to be in EA? There’s no standards certification body, so in my estimation it comes down to “the eye of the beholder”. But curious what others think.
For example, I heavily support Vegan Outreach because their goal is to get people to go vegan as efficiently as possible. Yet they aren’t on any EA animal welfare lists, they’re not interested in going to the conferences or getting more involved in the community. They want to focus on vegan conversations. And I respect that.
Self identification seems like an obvious condition. If you were sharing news that Mr Beast was calling himself an EA, none of these comments would apply.
I have seen popular uses of the term “effective altruist” in a way that doesn’t require self-identification. In this example Peter Singer refers to Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates and Warren Buffet as the most effective altruists in history.
“these people have been the most effective altruists in history” is about them being effective and altruistic, not members of a community called Effective Altruism.
Probably worth distinguishing the claim that someone “is an EA” and “is an altruist who is effective”. I think of the acronym EA as referring to our community in particular, not just the practice of evidence-based philanthropy broadly. Someone can be an effective altruist in the ordinary sense of those words, without being an Effective Altruist in the member-of-the-community sense.
I think that you are right as far as it coming down to “the eye of the beholder”.
I had a related conversation about a year ago, and the best I could come up with was a sort of two by two matrix, with behavior and self-proclaimed identity. I find that framework useful in the context of MRBeast’s video, as I find my intuition leaning toward considering him aligned with some EA ideas, or adjacent to EA, but since he hasn’t (to my knowledge) claimed himself as an EA, I would hesitate to say that he is an EA.
For example “at the Leaders Forum 2019, around half of the participants (including key figures in EA) said that they don’t self-identify as “effective altruists”. ”
I think people can be heavily involved in something without having to take the identity of that thing. For example, if someone worked 15 years at Google, they wouldn’t have to describe themselves as a ‘googler’ even if the P&C team calls everyone a googler with a shared Google identity.
I think I disagree with this perspective because, to me, the doing is the identity in a certain importance sense.
Like I think everyone GWWC Pledger should reasonably be expected to be identified as an EA, even if they don’t claim the self identity. If MacAskill or Moskovitiz’s behaviour changed 0% apart from they stopped self-identifying as an EA, I still think it’d make sense to consider them EAs.
What really annoys me with the ‘EA = Specific EA Community’ is takes like this or this—the ideas part of EA is what matters. If CEA and OpenPhil disbanded I’d still be donating to effective charities because of the ideas involved, and the ‘self-identification/specific community lineage’ explanation cannot really explain this imho.
(p.s. not trying to go in too hard on you David, I was torn about whether to respond to this thread or @Karthik Tadepalli’s above. Perhaps we should meet and have a chat about it sometime if you think that’s productive at all?)
Can you put a note in the post explaining what the old title was, and that you changed it? As it stands I imagine a lot of people coming to the comments confused about what everyone is talking about.
I’ve updated the title, but to those of you who had a problem with me asserting that engaging publicly with Give Directly qualifies someone as an EA, what criteria do you think is required for someone/something to be in EA? There’s no standards certification body, so in my estimation it comes down to “the eye of the beholder”. But curious what others think.
For example, I heavily support Vegan Outreach because their goal is to get people to go vegan as efficiently as possible. Yet they aren’t on any EA animal welfare lists, they’re not interested in going to the conferences or getting more involved in the community. They want to focus on vegan conversations. And I respect that.
Giving What We Can also said as much in their latest blog post on the pledge, noting that pledgers get to decide what they consider is effective. https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/en/blog/5-things-you-ve-got-wrong-about-the-giving-what-we-can-pledge
Self identification seems like an obvious condition. If you were sharing news that Mr Beast was calling himself an EA, none of these comments would apply.
I have seen popular uses of the term “effective altruist” in a way that doesn’t require self-identification. In this example Peter Singer refers to Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates and Warren Buffet as the most effective altruists in history.
“these people have been the most effective altruists in history” is about them being effective and altruistic, not members of a community called Effective Altruism.
Probably worth distinguishing the claim that someone “is an EA” and “is an altruist who is effective”. I think of the acronym EA as referring to our community in particular, not just the practice of evidence-based philanthropy broadly. Someone can be an effective altruist in the ordinary sense of those words, without being an Effective Altruist in the member-of-the-community sense.
So capitalization matters. I can get behind that 😊
I think that you are right as far as it coming down to “the eye of the beholder”.
I had a related conversation about a year ago, and the best I could come up with was a sort of two by two matrix, with behavior and self-proclaimed identity. I find that framework useful in the context of MRBeast’s video, as I find my intuition leaning toward considering him aligned with some EA ideas, or adjacent to EA, but since he hasn’t (to my knowledge) claimed himself as an EA, I would hesitate to say that he is an EA.
Self identification makes most sense to me.
For example “at the Leaders Forum 2019, around half of the participants (including key figures in EA) said that they don’t self-identify as “effective altruists”. ”
To me that actually seems like an argument against self-identification as a criteria.
What’s your reasoning?
If you’re attending the Leaders Forum or are a ‘key figure in EA’, you’re probably an EA, even if you don’t admit it to yourself.
I think people can be heavily involved in something without having to take the identity of that thing. For example, if someone worked 15 years at Google, they wouldn’t have to describe themselves as a ‘googler’ even if the P&C team calls everyone a googler with a shared Google identity.
I think I disagree with this perspective because, to me, the doing is the identity in a certain importance sense.
Like I think everyone GWWC Pledger should reasonably be expected to be identified as an EA, even if they don’t claim the self identity. If MacAskill or Moskovitiz’s behaviour changed 0% apart from they stopped self-identifying as an EA, I still think it’d make sense to consider them EAs.
What really annoys me with the ‘EA = Specific EA Community’ is takes like this or this—the ideas part of EA is what matters. If CEA and OpenPhil disbanded I’d still be donating to effective charities because of the ideas involved, and the ‘self-identification/specific community lineage’ explanation cannot really explain this imho.
(p.s. not trying to go in too hard on you David, I was torn about whether to respond to this thread or @Karthik Tadepalli’s above. Perhaps we should meet and have a chat about it sometime if you think that’s productive at all?)
Can you put a note in the post explaining what the old title was, and that you changed it? As it stands I imagine a lot of people coming to the comments confused about what everyone is talking about.