Spending time explaining EA to my family over the holidays has helped remind me off why I think “do the Most! Possible! Good!” is a good concept, and a good rallying cry for a community.
At a glance, it’s weird to have a community that has such crazily heterogeneous interests.
But, in fact, it sure is bizarrely rare that groups of science-minded human beings explicitly try to justify their actions or strategies in terms of “do the Most! Possible! Good!”!
And it sure is nice to have a rallying cry that encourages cause neutrality and intervention disloyalty. If a cause stops looking like a good idea to you, your community (or at least a subset thereof) is there to praise you for pivoting.
And it sure is cool to have a community exist that challenges people to up their game?
Like, in some ways that’s all that EAs have in common. We’re that rare subset of humans who were minimally science-y enough to not get eye-rolled out of the group (e.g., we’re not Christian missionaries), and who accept the challenge “try at all to do the most-good thing”.
We’re brash enough to try to argue for our take on what the literal best thing to do is. We’re audacious enough to fight the other so-called “EAs” for the title. We’re not going to settle for anything less, or shrug and seek out some trophy easier-won. That’s what EA is.
Spending time explaining EA to my family over the holidays has helped remind me off why I think “do the Most! Possible! Good!” is a good concept, and a good rallying cry for a community.
At a glance, it’s weird to have a community that has such crazily heterogeneous interests.
But, in fact, it sure is bizarrely rare that groups of science-minded human beings explicitly try to justify their actions or strategies in terms of “do the Most! Possible! Good!”!
And it sure is nice to have a rallying cry that encourages cause neutrality and intervention disloyalty. If a cause stops looking like a good idea to you, your community (or at least a subset thereof) is there to praise you for pivoting.
And it sure is cool to have a community exist that challenges people to up their game?
Like, in some ways that’s all that EAs have in common. We’re that rare subset of humans who were minimally science-y enough to not get eye-rolled out of the group (e.g., we’re not Christian missionaries), and who accept the challenge “try at all to do the most-good thing”.
We’re brash enough to try to argue for our take on what the literal best thing to do is. We’re audacious enough to fight the other so-called “EAs” for the title. We’re not going to settle for anything less, or shrug and seek out some trophy easier-won. That’s what EA is.