Empirical research on people’s responses to the term (and alternative terms) certainly seems valuable, and important to do before any potential rebrand.
Anecdotally, I find that people hate reference to “priorities” or “prioritising” as much or more than they hate “effective altruism.” Referring to specific “global priorities” quite overtly implies that other things are not priorities. And terminology aside, I find that many people outright oppose “prioritisation” in the field of philanthropic or pro-social endeavours for roughly this reason: it’s rude/inappropriate to imply that certain good things that people care about are more important than others. (The use of the word “global” just makes this even worse: this implies that you don’t even just think that they are local or otherwise particular priorities, but rather that they are the priorities for everyone!)
To some extent, I think that what those who dislike effective altruism dislike isn’t that term, but rather the set of ideas it expresses. As such, replacing it with another term that’s supposed to express broadly the same set of ideas (like “priorities” or “global priorities”) might make less of a difference than one might think at first glance (though it likely makes some difference).
What might make a greater difference, for better or worse, is choosing a term that expresses a quite different set of ideas. E.g. I think that people have substantially different reactions to the term “longtermism”.
+1. A short version of my thoughts here is that I’d be interested in changing the EA name if we can find a better alternative, because it does have some downsides, but this particular alternative seems worse from a strict persuasion perspective.
Most of the pushback I feel when talking to otherwise-promising people about EA is not really as much about content as it is about framing: it’s people feeling EA is too cold, too uncaring, too Spock-like, too thoughtless about the impact it might have on those causes deemed ineffective, too naive to realise the impact living this way will have on the people who dive into it. I think you can see this in many critiques.
(Obviously, this isn’t universal; some people embrace the Spock-like-mindset and the quantification. I do, to some extent, or I wouldn’t be here. But I’ve been steadily more convinced over the years that it’s a small minority.)
You can fight this by framing your ideas in warmer terms, but it does seem like starting at ‘Global Priorities community’ makes the battle more uphill. And I find losing this group sad, because I think the actual EA community is relatively warm, but first impressions are tough to overcome.
Low confidence on all of the above, would be happy to see data.
I still think “effective altruism” sounds a bit more like we’ve already found the correct answer to “what should we prioritize” rather than just being interested in the question, but I agree these are some good points.
Empirical research on people’s responses to the term (and alternative terms) certainly seems valuable, and important to do before any potential rebrand.
Anecdotally, I find that people hate reference to “priorities” or “prioritising” as much or more than they hate “effective altruism.” Referring to specific “global priorities” quite overtly implies that other things are not priorities. And terminology aside, I find that many people outright oppose “prioritisation” in the field of philanthropic or pro-social endeavours for roughly this reason: it’s rude/inappropriate to imply that certain good things that people care about are more important than others. (The use of the word “global” just makes this even worse: this implies that you don’t even just think that they are local or otherwise particular priorities, but rather that they are the priorities for everyone!)
To some extent, I think that what those who dislike effective altruism dislike isn’t that term, but rather the set of ideas it expresses. As such, replacing it with another term that’s supposed to express broadly the same set of ideas (like “priorities” or “global priorities”) might make less of a difference than one might think at first glance (though it likely makes some difference).
What might make a greater difference, for better or worse, is choosing a term that expresses a quite different set of ideas. E.g. I think that people have substantially different reactions to the term “longtermism”.
+1. A short version of my thoughts here is that I’d be interested in changing the EA name if we can find a better alternative, because it does have some downsides, but this particular alternative seems worse from a strict persuasion perspective.
Most of the pushback I feel when talking to otherwise-promising people about EA is not really as much about content as it is about framing: it’s people feeling EA is too cold, too uncaring, too Spock-like, too thoughtless about the impact it might have on those causes deemed ineffective, too naive to realise the impact living this way will have on the people who dive into it. I think you can see this in many critiques.
(Obviously, this isn’t universal; some people embrace the Spock-like-mindset and the quantification. I do, to some extent, or I wouldn’t be here. But I’ve been steadily more convinced over the years that it’s a small minority.)
You can fight this by framing your ideas in warmer terms, but it does seem like starting at ‘Global Priorities community’ makes the battle more uphill. And I find losing this group sad, because I think the actual EA community is relatively warm, but first impressions are tough to overcome.
Low confidence on all of the above, would be happy to see data.
I still think “effective altruism” sounds a bit more like we’ve already found the correct answer to “what should we prioritize” rather than just being interested in the question, but I agree these are some good points.