There sort of is—I’ve seen some EAs use the light bulb emoji 💡 on Twitter (I assume this comes from the EA logo) -- but it’s not widely used, and it’s unclear to me whether it means “identifies as an EA” or “is a practicing EA” (i.e. donates a substantial percentage of their income to EA causes and/or does direct work on those causes).
I’m unsure whether I want there to be an easy way to “identify as EA”, since identities do seem to make people worse at thinking clearly. I’ve thought/written about this (in the context of a neoliberal identity too, as it happens), and my conclusion was basically that a strong EA identity would be okay so long as the centerpiece of the identity continues to be a question (“How can we do the most good?”) as opposed to any particular answer. I’m not sure how realistic that is, though.
I second your hesitation about the upside/downside to “identifying as an EA”. But I honestly don’t think you can help this sort of thing happening. The most you can do is actively guide the values that are defining your group. In the early days of the neoliberal subreddit (the earliest large-scale group of modern self-identified neoliberals), one of the slogans we used was ‘evidence based policy’. The leaders and prominent members of the subreddit tried to instill ‘evidence based policy’ as a core value to the members, to offset the dangers of groupthink, to make people be willing to change their minds. EBP is a complicated subject and it’s not like most people are really out there reading research papers. But it’s important to at least have people signaling that they are open to changing their minds. Signaling can become reality.
There sort of is—I’ve seen some EAs use the light bulb emoji 💡 on Twitter (I assume this comes from the EA logo) -- but it’s not widely used, and it’s unclear to me whether it means “identifies as an EA” or “is a practicing EA” (i.e. donates a substantial percentage of their income to EA causes and/or does direct work on those causes).
I’m unsure whether I want there to be an easy way to “identify as EA”, since identities do seem to make people worse at thinking clearly. I’ve thought/written about this (in the context of a neoliberal identity too, as it happens), and my conclusion was basically that a strong EA identity would be okay so long as the centerpiece of the identity continues to be a question (“How can we do the most good?”) as opposed to any particular answer. I’m not sure how realistic that is, though.
Loved the post you linked!
I second your hesitation about the upside/downside to “identifying as an EA”. But I honestly don’t think you can help this sort of thing happening. The most you can do is actively guide the values that are defining your group. In the early days of the neoliberal subreddit (the earliest large-scale group of modern self-identified neoliberals), one of the slogans we used was ‘evidence based policy’. The leaders and prominent members of the subreddit tried to instill ‘evidence based policy’ as a core value to the members, to offset the dangers of groupthink, to make people be willing to change their minds. EBP is a complicated subject and it’s not like most people are really out there reading research papers. But it’s important to at least have people signaling that they are open to changing their minds. Signaling can become reality.
Did you succeed in guiding the values? Did the ‘evidence based policy’ become part of Neo-liberal internet identity?