For better or for worse, I think it may be difficult to “police the door” on who should and shouldn’t call themselves an effective altruist. For example, a whole lot of people call themselves environmentalists, even if they’re doing little or nothing for the environment besides holding opinions positive to environmentalism. On the flip side, there are people doing more for the environment than the typical environmentalist.
In practice, I think that what words people use to describe themselves has more to do with what words their friends use to describe themselves. This applies to me too—like Peter, I’m a GWWC member, but I don’t self-identify as effective altruist, and I think this is because I don’t feel very connected to the community.
I think this works in reverse too. “Queer” is a word that naively seems well defined to exclude some people, but I know people who self-identify as queer even though they are both straight and cisgender. I’m not criticizing—these people are also usually careful to communicate clearly about what this means. I say this to point out how difficult it can be to clearly define group membership.
GWWC has a well defined criterion for membership, and there could be other similar organizations with well defined criteria, but I’m not sure that we could give the movement itself a well defined criterion even if we wanted to.
For better or for worse, I think it may be difficult to “police the door” on who should and shouldn’t call themselves an effective altruist. For example, a whole lot of people call themselves environmentalists, even if they’re doing little or nothing for the environment besides holding opinions positive to environmentalism. On the flip side, there are people doing more for the environment than the typical environmentalist.
In practice, I think that what words people use to describe themselves has more to do with what words their friends use to describe themselves. This applies to me too—like Peter, I’m a GWWC member, but I don’t self-identify as effective altruist, and I think this is because I don’t feel very connected to the community.
I think this works in reverse too. “Queer” is a word that naively seems well defined to exclude some people, but I know people who self-identify as queer even though they are both straight and cisgender. I’m not criticizing—these people are also usually careful to communicate clearly about what this means. I say this to point out how difficult it can be to clearly define group membership.
GWWC has a well defined criterion for membership, and there could be other similar organizations with well defined criteria, but I’m not sure that we could give the movement itself a well defined criterion even if we wanted to.