Do other types of movements make this distinction? Political parties… “Environmentalists”...religious traditions.
Yes, these terms (or their cognates) are routinely applied to all these examples, and more, because the concepts are indispensable. The clergy/leity distinction is orthogonal to this: we certainly distinguish between the most devout, diehard, extreme, hardcore Christians and the soft, liberal, nominal, softcore vaguely Christian.
Having strictly defined categories of involvement doesn’t seem likely to help.
I’ve not seen any strictly defined categories. That seems impracticable more than harmful. The terms are vague, continuous, context-sensitive and clearly non-binary.
A separate point:
One of the things I love about effective altruism is that it demonstrates how small changes...can lead to big impacts. I would hate to see these kinds of changes minimized as “soft.”
On the other hand, some construe Effective Altruism as necessarily being about doing the most good you can do, even emphasizing explicitly in more or less these exact words “it’s not merely about giving somewhere that will do a lot of good, but where will do the most good.” That implies a certain degree of maximizing and aspiration to do better.
Yes, these terms (or their cognates) are routinely applied to all these examples, and more, because the concepts are indispensable. The clergy/leity distinction is orthogonal to this: we certainly distinguish between the most devout, diehard, extreme, hardcore Christians and the soft, liberal, nominal, softcore vaguely Christian.
I’ve not seen any strictly defined categories. That seems impracticable more than harmful. The terms are vague, continuous, context-sensitive and clearly non-binary.
A separate point:
On the other hand, some construe Effective Altruism as necessarily being about doing the most good you can do, even emphasizing explicitly in more or less these exact words “it’s not merely about giving somewhere that will do a lot of good, but where will do the most good.” That implies a certain degree of maximizing and aspiration to do better.