The current discussion in the comments seems quite centered on “effective altruism vs. global priorities”. I just wanted to highlight that I spent, like, 3 minutes in total thinking about alternative naming options, and feel pretty confident that there are probably quite a few options that work better than “global priorities”. In fact, when renaming CLR, we only came up with the new name after brainstorming many options. So I would really like us to generate a list of >10 great alternatives (i.e. actually viable alternatives) before starting to compare them.
Off the top of my head, I think how we[1] should proceed is something like:
Generate a long list of possible labels
Generate a set of goals we have / criteria for evaluating the labels
Generate a set of broader approaches we could take, such as having different labels that we use for different audiences, or different labels for different segments of the community, or
Then evaluate the labels and approaches (or combinations thereof) against the goals / criteria we came up with
I think the first three actions can/should be done roughly in parallel, and that the fourth should mostly wait till we’ve done the first three. Or we might iterate through “first three actions, then fourth action, then first three actions again …” a few times.
And I’d say this is best done through one or more well-run surveys, as you suggest. Maybe there could first be surveys that ask EAs to generate ideas for labels, goals/criteria, and broader approaches, then ask them to rate given ideas and approaches against given goals/criteria (or maybe that should be split into a followup survey). And then there could be surveys of non-EAs that just skip to that last step (since I imagine it’d be hard for them to come up with useful ideas without context first).
I really liked this comment, thanks!
The current discussion in the comments seems quite centered on “effective altruism vs. global priorities”. I just wanted to highlight that I spent, like, 3 minutes in total thinking about alternative naming options, and feel pretty confident that there are probably quite a few options that work better than “global priorities”. In fact, when renaming CLR, we only came up with the new name after brainstorming many options. So I would really like us to generate a list of >10 great alternatives (i.e. actually viable alternatives) before starting to compare them.
This seems like a really good point.
Off the top of my head, I think how we[1] should proceed is something like:
Generate a long list of possible labels
Generate a set of goals we have / criteria for evaluating the labels
Generate a set of broader approaches we could take, such as having different labels that we use for different audiences, or different labels for different segments of the community, or
Then evaluate the labels and approaches (or combinations thereof) against the goals / criteria we came up with
I think the first three actions can/should be done roughly in parallel, and that the fourth should mostly wait till we’ve done the first three. Or we might iterate through “first three actions, then fourth action, then first three actions again …” a few times.
And I’d say this is best done through one or more well-run surveys, as you suggest. Maybe there could first be surveys that ask EAs to generate ideas for labels, goals/criteria, and broader approaches, then ask them to rate given ideas and approaches against given goals/criteria (or maybe that should be split into a followup survey). And then there could be surveys of non-EAs that just skip to that last step (since I imagine it’d be hard for them to come up with useful ideas without context first).
[1] I’m not sure who the relevant “we” is.