Reading this thread, I sort of get the impression that the crux here is between people who want EA to be more institutional (for which purpose the current name is kind of a problem) and people who want it to be more grassroots (for which purpose the current name works pretty okay).
There are other issues with the current name, like the thing where it opens us up to accusations of hypocrisy every time we fail to outperform anyone on anything, but I’m not sure that that’s really what’s driving the disagreement here. Partly, this is because people have tried to come up with better names over the years (though not always with a view towards driving serious adoption of them; often just as an intellectual exercise), and I don’t think any of the candidates have produced widespread reactions of “oh yeah I wish we’d thought of that in 2012”, even among people who see problems with the current name. So coming up with a name that’s better than “effective altruism”, by the lights of what the community currently is, seems like a pretty hard problem. (Obviously this is skewed somewhat by the inertia behind the current name, but I don’t think that fully explains what’s going on here.) When people do suggest different names, it tends to be because they think some or all of the community is emphasizing the wrong things, and want to pivot towards right ones.
“Global priorities community” definitely sounds incompatible with a grassroots direction; if I said that I was starting a one-person global priorities project in my basement, this would sound ridiculously grandiose and like I’d been severely Dunning-Krugered, whereas with an EA project this is fine.
For what it’s worth, I’d prefer a name that’s clearly compatible with both the institutional and the grassroots side, because it seems clear to me that both of these are in scope for the EA mandate and it’s not acceptable to trade off either of them. The current name sounds a little more grassroots than I’d like, but again, I don’t have any better ideas.
At one point I pitched Impartialist Maximizing Rationalist-Empiricist-Epistemological Welfarist-Axiological Ideology, or IMREEWAI for short, but for some strange reason nobody liked that idea :-P
Reading this thread, I sort of get the impression that the crux here is between people who want EA to be more institutional (for which purpose the current name is kind of a problem) and people who want it to be more grassroots (for which purpose the current name works pretty okay).
There are other issues with the current name, like the thing where it opens us up to accusations of hypocrisy every time we fail to outperform anyone on anything, but I’m not sure that that’s really what’s driving the disagreement here. Partly, this is because people have tried to come up with better names over the years (though not always with a view towards driving serious adoption of them; often just as an intellectual exercise), and I don’t think any of the candidates have produced widespread reactions of “oh yeah I wish we’d thought of that in 2012”, even among people who see problems with the current name. So coming up with a name that’s better than “effective altruism”, by the lights of what the community currently is, seems like a pretty hard problem. (Obviously this is skewed somewhat by the inertia behind the current name, but I don’t think that fully explains what’s going on here.) When people do suggest different names, it tends to be because they think some or all of the community is emphasizing the wrong things, and want to pivot towards right ones.
“Global priorities community” definitely sounds incompatible with a grassroots direction; if I said that I was starting a one-person global priorities project in my basement, this would sound ridiculously grandiose and like I’d been severely Dunning-Krugered, whereas with an EA project this is fine.
For what it’s worth, I’d prefer a name that’s clearly compatible with both the institutional and the grassroots side, because it seems clear to me that both of these are in scope for the EA mandate and it’s not acceptable to trade off either of them. The current name sounds a little more grassroots than I’d like, but again, I don’t have any better ideas.
At one point I pitched Impartialist Maximizing Rationalist-Empiricist-Epistemological Welfarist-Axiological Ideology, or IMREEWAI for short, but for some strange reason nobody liked that idea :-P