Sure, but then how do you you refer to the group that are effective altruists but not ‘full-time’ (or whatever term)? ‘Effective altruists who aren’t full time’ is very cumbersome. People want to refer to this group when speaking and if they don’t have a nice term to hand, will use one that isn’t nice.
What is actually wrong with ‘Effective altruists’?
If I talk about ‘Christians’ without much context, you will assume I am referring to the baseline Christian who believes in Jesus, God and the Resurrection, has a passing but far from comprehensive knowledge of the bible, etc. If I want to refer to a narrower group than that, I might say ‘pastors’, ‘fundamentalist Christians’, etc. I don’t need to say something like ‘casual Christians’.
Similarly, if I talk about ‘Labour supporters’ without much context, you will assume I am referring to the lowest common denominator; people who routinely vote Labour and broadly agree with the party’s policy stances. Not activists, donors, politicians, or wannabe politicians.
Partly this is a numbers game; the vast majority of Christians (at least in an irreligious country like the UK) are concentrated at the casual end of the spectrum. Ditto for Labour supporters, environmentalists, and even animal welfare advocates. So if you refer to them on mass, it can be safely assumed you are talking about the casual version. Movements virtually always overwhelmingly concentrate at the casual end, because it’s just very hard to get people to do anything that isn’t casual.
I really don’t expect EA to be any different even within a year or two if it isn’t there already, and I think the only reason it looks a bit different now is because (a) the core is relatively large due to the youth of the movement and (b) we’re having this discussion on the EA forum, which was created by the core for the core.
Edit: But if you insist on having a modifier, what about ‘most’? If I want to communicate the fact that ‘casual’, ‘liberal’, Christians in the UK are not anti-gay-marriage, I would just say something like ‘actually most Christians in the UK aren’t anti-gay-marriage, even if the archbishops are’. I can imagine similar statements for EAs such as:
‘Most EAs don’t give nearly as much as they think they should.’
‘Most EAs don’t change their careers for EA reasons.’
etc.
To put this another way—when I’m giving someone career advice, how ‘hardcore’ they are is one of the top 3 things I need to know to tailor the information to them so that it’s actually useful.
Things that make our content more appealing to ‘hardcore’ people can make it less appealing to ‘softcore’ people and vice versa. If I need to communicate that to someone else on the team, I need a way to express it in words.
Because I’m doing work to directly serve these different groups, I can’t afford to enter a fantasy land where we refuse to have a descriptive term for a group, because acknowledging its existence would hurt someone’s feelings.
Very good points! I was updating closer to ABG’s position initially, but these points convinced me that we really need terms to indicate both the lower end and the higher end of involvement. Thanks!
I just think you’re trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. The reason I think it doesn’t exist is because most movements don’t have the problem. You can either explain why we’re actually different, how they are actually the same, or why such successful movements as Christianity and the Labour movement also living in fantasy land. In the last case you also need to explain why living in fantasy land is actually bad if it doesn’t prevent such success (i.e. Could it be, maybe, that respecting people’s feelings correlates with movement building success..?)
What you can’t do is patronise the problem out of existence. I await a real response that meets one of the above three criteria.
I don’t think we are different. I think those groups do use extreme and some other term for less extreme. Perhaps not in their induction booklet, but internally definitely they do. How can they possibly canvas without recognising the range of views in the people they speak to?
There are benefits to being welcoming, and there are benefits to being demanding. I think being so undemanding that we go far out of our way to avoid thinking about or drawing attention to differences in how extreme people’s attitudes are is too far. We have to retain at least some intellectual honesty about describing the world as we see it and not bullshitting the people we speak to.
We have a set A, that is comprised of (non-overlapping) subsets B and C.
You’re saying we should have a name for A, a name for B, but refuse to have a name for C.
It won’t work. People will naturally want to refer to group C when composing sentences. We need a word we like, or we’ll get one we don’t.
I do indeed use expressions like ‘relaxed Christians’, ‘soft-core labour members’, etc. It’s absurd to discourage the use of such terms when identifying those groups. The world is the way it is, describing it doesn’t make it so. If someone doesn’t want to be called a soft-core labour member, maybe they should be more hardcore.
Perception of reality >> reality most of the time. Reality only affects how the world works right now, perception of reality affects how everyone responds to it which in turn affects how the world works in future. Many perceptions are self-fulfilling, so that perception will in fact become the reality after a (typically short) time delay.
‘EA is hardcore-only’ is actually a classic example of such a perception. Whether it’s actually true is just much much less important than whether people think it’s true, because the latter is a better predictor of reality in the long term than the former. And presumably we care about the long-term.
In my ideal world everyone would be a hardcore EA.
I think we should also be fun for those who aren’t willing to be extreme yet, or ever if they are willing to meet some minimum bar.
I agree softcore is too unappealing a term. Part-time seems fine and not negative by design.
I think we must be honest internally about how extreme people’s views are, or we lose a great deal of clarity in describing them. There’s just no practical way I can do my work without thinking and talking in terms of how dedicated someone is to doing good at cost to themselves. This level of group taboo even risks pushing us in the direction of ceasing to be aware that we are trying to get people to become more extreme.
What’s ‘internally’? I have no interest in policing people’s internal thoughts or private conversations where they are confident they everyone in the room is going to understand what they mean. But that’s in the same way as I don’t mind the use of the vast majority of offensive language behind firmly closed doors; I just can’t see the harm. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t offensive*.
But anything that could at some point be read by a journalist, including this forum and random blog posts, should be held to a significantly higher standard in my book. The clarity versus reputational risk trade-off looks alarmingly poor given you’re basically complaining about having to add an extra clause or two to your sentences in public-facing material only.
*Not that I would go as far as calling the suggestions here offensive. I’m just elaborating on the principle.
Sounds like we have been talking past one another—I’m really only talking about closed-door conversations and thoughts in your head. Clearly you have to be much more careful when speaking to a wide audience.
In response to edit: Most is at least something, but it makes it pretty unclear what you are driving at. Compare:
Most EAs don’t eat enough vegetables.
Softcare EAs / Part time EAs don’t eat enough vegetables.
In one case you’re just making a general statement about everyone. In the second you’re claiming this is correlated with how extreme their attitudes are.
I prefer full-time and part-time. It’s not insulting. It’s quite descriptive. Let’s just go with that.
‘Most EAs don’t eat enough vegetables, though the dedicated ones do’ sounds fine to me. It’s actually almost directly analogous to my chosen example (‘actually most Christians in the UK aren’t anti-gay-marriage, even if the archbishops are’).
I find going this far out of our way to be indirect and use convoluted sentence structures to avoid acknowledging some people’s lax moral attitudes a bad sign about our intellectual integrity.
Why does this avoid acknowledging? The example I gave conveys the same factual information that casual EAs suck at eating vegetables, which means it acknowledges and indeed explicitly states the same factual reality. If I was refusing to even talk about the state of the world, then worrying about intellectual integrity seems reasonable.
But actually the content is unchanged, and all it does is eliminate a loaded word that can and will be used to make some people feel bad, whether you want it to or not.
Whereas I’ve never yet met the person who has been offended by being caught under the qualifier ‘most’.
This is complicated by the fact that you might just want to make the statement about literal vegetables, where “most” is true but doesn’t align with a level of dedication.
I’m sympathetic to not generally using a term for this.
Sure, but then how do you you refer to the group that are effective altruists but not ‘full-time’ (or whatever term)? ‘Effective altruists who aren’t full time’ is very cumbersome. People want to refer to this group when speaking and if they don’t have a nice term to hand, will use one that isn’t nice.
What is actually wrong with ‘Effective altruists’?
If I talk about ‘Christians’ without much context, you will assume I am referring to the baseline Christian who believes in Jesus, God and the Resurrection, has a passing but far from comprehensive knowledge of the bible, etc. If I want to refer to a narrower group than that, I might say ‘pastors’, ‘fundamentalist Christians’, etc. I don’t need to say something like ‘casual Christians’.
Similarly, if I talk about ‘Labour supporters’ without much context, you will assume I am referring to the lowest common denominator; people who routinely vote Labour and broadly agree with the party’s policy stances. Not activists, donors, politicians, or wannabe politicians.
Partly this is a numbers game; the vast majority of Christians (at least in an irreligious country like the UK) are concentrated at the casual end of the spectrum. Ditto for Labour supporters, environmentalists, and even animal welfare advocates. So if you refer to them on mass, it can be safely assumed you are talking about the casual version. Movements virtually always overwhelmingly concentrate at the casual end, because it’s just very hard to get people to do anything that isn’t casual.
I really don’t expect EA to be any different even within a year or two if it isn’t there already, and I think the only reason it looks a bit different now is because (a) the core is relatively large due to the youth of the movement and (b) we’re having this discussion on the EA forum, which was created by the core for the core.
Edit: But if you insist on having a modifier, what about ‘most’? If I want to communicate the fact that ‘casual’, ‘liberal’, Christians in the UK are not anti-gay-marriage, I would just say something like ‘actually most Christians in the UK aren’t anti-gay-marriage, even if the archbishops are’. I can imagine similar statements for EAs such as:
‘Most EAs don’t give nearly as much as they think they should.’ ‘Most EAs don’t change their careers for EA reasons.’ etc.
To put this another way—when I’m giving someone career advice, how ‘hardcore’ they are is one of the top 3 things I need to know to tailor the information to them so that it’s actually useful.
Things that make our content more appealing to ‘hardcore’ people can make it less appealing to ‘softcore’ people and vice versa. If I need to communicate that to someone else on the team, I need a way to express it in words.
Because I’m doing work to directly serve these different groups, I can’t afford to enter a fantasy land where we refuse to have a descriptive term for a group, because acknowledging its existence would hurt someone’s feelings.
For this purpose, things like “more committed” and “less committed” seem like they would work, and indicate a range rather than firm categories.
Very good points! I was updating closer to ABG’s position initially, but these points convinced me that we really need terms to indicate both the lower end and the higher end of involvement. Thanks!
I just think you’re trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. The reason I think it doesn’t exist is because most movements don’t have the problem. You can either explain why we’re actually different, how they are actually the same, or why such successful movements as Christianity and the Labour movement also living in fantasy land. In the last case you also need to explain why living in fantasy land is actually bad if it doesn’t prevent such success (i.e. Could it be, maybe, that respecting people’s feelings correlates with movement building success..?)
What you can’t do is patronise the problem out of existence. I await a real response that meets one of the above three criteria.
I don’t think we are different. I think those groups do use extreme and some other term for less extreme. Perhaps not in their induction booklet, but internally definitely they do. How can they possibly canvas without recognising the range of views in the people they speak to?
There are benefits to being welcoming, and there are benefits to being demanding. I think being so undemanding that we go far out of our way to avoid thinking about or drawing attention to differences in how extreme people’s attitudes are is too far. We have to retain at least some intellectual honesty about describing the world as we see it and not bullshitting the people we speak to.
Because effective altruists includes both groups.
We have a set A, that is comprised of (non-overlapping) subsets B and C.
You’re saying we should have a name for A, a name for B, but refuse to have a name for C.
It won’t work. People will naturally want to refer to group C when composing sentences. We need a word we like, or we’ll get one we don’t.
I do indeed use expressions like ‘relaxed Christians’, ‘soft-core labour members’, etc. It’s absurd to discourage the use of such terms when identifying those groups. The world is the way it is, describing it doesn’t make it so. If someone doesn’t want to be called a soft-core labour member, maybe they should be more hardcore.
“The world is the way it is, describing it doesn’t make it so.”
This is true of the natural world, but not of the social world. Our categorisations of social behaviour have well-known consequences on behaviour.
Perception of reality >> reality most of the time. Reality only affects how the world works right now, perception of reality affects how everyone responds to it which in turn affects how the world works in future. Many perceptions are self-fulfilling, so that perception will in fact become the reality after a (typically short) time delay.
‘EA is hardcore-only’ is actually a classic example of such a perception. Whether it’s actually true is just much much less important than whether people think it’s true, because the latter is a better predictor of reality in the long term than the former. And presumably we care about the long-term.
In my ideal world everyone would be a hardcore EA.
I think we should also be fun for those who aren’t willing to be extreme yet, or ever if they are willing to meet some minimum bar.
I agree softcore is too unappealing a term. Part-time seems fine and not negative by design.
I think we must be honest internally about how extreme people’s views are, or we lose a great deal of clarity in describing them. There’s just no practical way I can do my work without thinking and talking in terms of how dedicated someone is to doing good at cost to themselves. This level of group taboo even risks pushing us in the direction of ceasing to be aware that we are trying to get people to become more extreme.
What’s ‘internally’? I have no interest in policing people’s internal thoughts or private conversations where they are confident they everyone in the room is going to understand what they mean. But that’s in the same way as I don’t mind the use of the vast majority of offensive language behind firmly closed doors; I just can’t see the harm. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t offensive*.
But anything that could at some point be read by a journalist, including this forum and random blog posts, should be held to a significantly higher standard in my book. The clarity versus reputational risk trade-off looks alarmingly poor given you’re basically complaining about having to add an extra clause or two to your sentences in public-facing material only.
*Not that I would go as far as calling the suggestions here offensive. I’m just elaborating on the principle.
Sounds like we have been talking past one another—I’m really only talking about closed-door conversations and thoughts in your head. Clearly you have to be much more careful when speaking to a wide audience.
That wasn’t really clear though, since this discussion started upon the term being used in public facing channels.
I thought I’d made it clear by talking about how it was necessary given my job and so on, but evidently I hadn’t.
In response to edit: Most is at least something, but it makes it pretty unclear what you are driving at. Compare:
Most EAs don’t eat enough vegetables.
Softcare EAs / Part time EAs don’t eat enough vegetables.
In one case you’re just making a general statement about everyone. In the second you’re claiming this is correlated with how extreme their attitudes are.
I prefer full-time and part-time. It’s not insulting. It’s quite descriptive. Let’s just go with that.
‘Most EAs don’t eat enough vegetables, though the dedicated ones do’ sounds fine to me. It’s actually almost directly analogous to my chosen example (‘actually most Christians in the UK aren’t anti-gay-marriage, even if the archbishops are’).
I find going this far out of our way to be indirect and use convoluted sentence structures to avoid acknowledging some people’s lax moral attitudes a bad sign about our intellectual integrity.
Why does this avoid acknowledging? The example I gave conveys the same factual information that casual EAs suck at eating vegetables, which means it acknowledges and indeed explicitly states the same factual reality. If I was refusing to even talk about the state of the world, then worrying about intellectual integrity seems reasonable.
But actually the content is unchanged, and all it does is eliminate a loaded word that can and will be used to make some people feel bad, whether you want it to or not.
Whereas I’ve never yet met the person who has been offended by being caught under the qualifier ‘most’.
This is complicated by the fact that you might just want to make the statement about literal vegetables, where “most” is true but doesn’t align with a level of dedication.
I’m sympathetic to not generally using a term for this.