I’ve seen a mix of some people capitalizing effective altruism, maybe more often in communications with a more general audience, and some people not capitalizing it. I generally try leave it uncapitalized, following CEA policy, but sometimes I capitalize it when it makes it clearer that effective altruism is an actual Thing, not just altruism that is effective, and not a generic made-up compound term like, say, “efficient humanitarianism” or “impactful lovingkindness”. For example, if I write in a self-introduction “I’m passionate about effective altruism”, lowercase effective altruism doesn’t read like a term that you could google, at least to someone who has never heard of effective altruism before, so I would probably capitalize effective altruism here. If it’s in a context where it’s clear to the readers that effective altruism is a specific thing, I would leave it lowercase. Minor note: somehow, some Hack4Impact folks have described Effective Altruism as an organization, in some Slack messages and in a social impact talk they wrote, and capitalizing the term may have contributed to that misconception.
I’ve seen a mix of some people capitalizing effective altruism, maybe more often in communications with a more general audience, and some people not capitalizing it. I generally try leave it uncapitalized, following CEA policy, but sometimes I capitalize it when it makes it clearer that effective altruism is an actual Thing, not just altruism that is effective, and not a generic made-up compound term like, say, “efficient humanitarianism” or “impactful lovingkindness”. For example, if I write in a self-introduction “I’m passionate about effective altruism”, lowercase effective altruism doesn’t read like a term that you could google, at least to someone who has never heard of effective altruism before, so I would probably capitalize effective altruism here. If it’s in a context where it’s clear to the readers that effective altruism is a specific thing, I would leave it lowercase. Minor note: somehow, some Hack4Impact folks have described Effective Altruism as an organization, in some Slack messages and in a social impact talk they wrote, and capitalizing the term may have contributed to that misconception.
I think using the definite article in phrases like “the effective altruism movement” can help.
Yeah, lowercase (other than in titles) is what helps ensure that “effective altruism” isn’t seen as a single organisation.