Thanks for writing this, I thought it was an interesting post—the point about translation awkwardness was especially new to me and seems pretty credible.
One consideration against I might consider would be that of organisational value drift. If you have invested a lot of effort into building an organisation, it makes sense to want to ensure it stays closely affiliated with the EA movement. If it has ‘Effective Altruism’ in the title, that is a powerful anchor. In contrast, if you’re called the ‘Positive Impact Club’ or somesuch, I can easily imagine someone arguing, “Well might not be EA but recycling awareness still has positive impact, so we should still promote it!” In particular, I think a strong name anchor makes it easier to resist social pressure from other activist groups on campus to promote their thing.
To give an anecdote on this concern: We had an Effective Animal Advocacy group at my college which, after the founding organizer left, was renamed to remove the effective and the focus shifted from more EAA related topics to general animal welfare.
I would be curious if you have any thoughts on the handover process and how you would mitigate this risk?
In general, I do like the idea of having a byline “part of the EA network” for a clearly aligned EA project, group or organisation.
It seems plausible that reasonable people might disagree on whether student groups on the whole would benefit from being more or less conforming to the EA consensus on things. One person’s “value drift” might be another person’s “conceptual innovation / development”.
On balance I think I find it more likely that an EA group would be co-opted in the way you describe than an EA group would feel limited from doing something effective because they were worried it was too “off-brand”, but it seems worth mentioning the latter as a possibility.
Thanks for writing this, I thought it was an interesting post—the point about translation awkwardness was especially new to me and seems pretty credible.
One consideration against I might consider would be that of organisational value drift. If you have invested a lot of effort into building an organisation, it makes sense to want to ensure it stays closely affiliated with the EA movement. If it has ‘Effective Altruism’ in the title, that is a powerful anchor. In contrast, if you’re called the ‘Positive Impact Club’ or somesuch, I can easily imagine someone arguing, “Well might not be EA but recycling awareness still has positive impact, so we should still promote it!” In particular, I think a strong name anchor makes it easier to resist social pressure from other activist groups on campus to promote their thing.
have two comments:
To give an anecdote on this concern: We had an Effective Animal Advocacy group at my college which, after the founding organizer left, was renamed to remove the effective and the focus shifted from more EAA related topics to general animal welfare.
I would be curious if you have any thoughts on the handover process and how you would mitigate this risk?
In general, I do like the idea of having a byline “part of the EA network” for a clearly aligned EA project, group or organisation.
It seems plausible that reasonable people might disagree on whether student groups on the whole would benefit from being more or less conforming to the EA consensus on things. One person’s “value drift” might be another person’s “conceptual innovation / development”.
On balance I think I find it more likely that an EA group would be co-opted in the way you describe than an EA group would feel limited from doing something effective because they were worried it was too “off-brand”, but it seems worth mentioning the latter as a possibility.