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I think you make good pointsâbasically all of these points came up in my mind when I read Jonasâs post and the comments there, so Iâm glad youâve already written them up nice and clearly!
That said, I think itâs also worth highlighting the following comment Jonas made on his post:
(See also my reply there.)
Yeah, if anything this post should be positioned as an argument against Ryan Carey, not Jonas. Ryan is the one who really ran with the GP label in his comment; it was clearly just a throwaway suggestion in Jonasâs post.
That said, given how much karma Ryanâs comment was getting itâs not obviously unreasonable to prepare a top-level response. But it should be positioned in that context, rather than misrepresenting Jonasâs post.
[Edited to weaken some overstrong phrasing]
Ugh, I really want to strongly object to that characterization of my post! I was mostly trying to share some concerns that I wasnât sure what to make of, and my key recommendation was that we âmight want to consider de-emphasizing the EA brandâ. Rebranding the EA community was more of a tentative personal opinion, and âglobal prioritiesâ was just a very tentative example for what the name could be in such a case.
I would appreciate if you could edit the post to make this clearer. I only discovered your post a day after it was posted, and am worried that people will now read my piece as saying something that I tried to avoid saying.
Otherwise, I think these are great points, and I agree with them. A lot ultimately comes down to empirical testing.
Hi Jonas. On taking a second look, the sentence that clinched me interpreting your argument as being for a name change from EA to GP (or something else) was:
â I personally would feel excited about rebranding âeffective altruismâ to a less ideological and more ideas-oriented brand (e.g., âglobal priorities communityâ, or simply âpriorities communityâ)â
I will make a note that you arenât advocating a name change. You may want to consider making this clearer in your post as well :)
If you look back at Jonasâ post a name change was just a âpotential implicationâ, alongside other steps to âde-emphasize the EA brandâ. I wouldnât say therefore that he is advocating a name change, just putting the idea out there.
Also he certainly doesnât advocate changing it to âGlobal Prioritiesâ specifically as you have claimed. It was just one very tentative idea he had (clue is in the use of âe.g.â).
EDIT: re-tracted as I thought AllAmericanBreakfast still thought Jonas was advocating for a name change but I misread
I donât know how much of an outlier I am, but I feel like âchange the name of the movementâ is mostly not an option on the table. Rather thereâs a question about how much (or when) to emphasise different labels, with the understanding that the different labels will necessarily refer to somewhat different things. (This is a different situation than an organisation considering a rebrand; in the movement case people who preferred the connotations of the older label are liable to just keep using it.)
Anyhow, I like your defence of âeffective altruismâ, and I donât think it should be abandoned (while still thinking that there are some contexts where it gets used but something else might be better).
I think itâs almost certainly possible to change the name of the movement if we want to â I think this would take an organization taking ownership of the project, hosting a well-organized Coordination Forum for the main stakeholders, and some good naming suggestions that lots of people can get behind. Doing something ambitious like this might also generally improve the EA communityâs ability to coordinate around larger projects, which generally seems a useful capacity to develop.
That said, it would be a very effortful project, and should be carefully traded off against other priorities that might have a better benefit/âcost ratio. It seems pretty likely to me that other priorities should be higher up on the list. This is why I also emphasized the âuse of different labels in different contextsâ more than the suggestion that we should rebrand EA in my original post.
(Perhaps thatâs what you meant with ânot an option on the tableâ? I felt sad when reading that because I understood it as pessimism about EAâs ability to coordinate, which I think hasnât really been attempted very well yet.)
Hmm, no, I didnât mean something that feels like pessimism about coordination ability, but that (roughly speaking) thing you get if you try to execute a âchange the name of the movementâ operation is not the same movement with a different name, but a different (albeit heavily overlapping) movement with the new name. And so itâs better understood as a coordinated heavy switch to emphasising the new brand than it is just a renaming (although I think the truth is actually somewhere in the middle).
I donât think thatâs true if the name change is minor so that the connotations are pretty similar. I think that switching from âeffective altruismâ to âefficient do-goodingâ is a switch which could more or less happen (youâd have a steady trickle of people coming in from having read old books or talked to people who were familiar with the old name, but âeffective altruism, now usually called efficient do-goodingâ would mostly work). But the identity of the movement is (at least somewhat) characterised by its name and how people understand it and relate to it. If you shifted to a name like âglobal prioritiesâ with quite different connotations, I think that it would change peopleâs relationship with the ideas, and you would probably find a significant group of people who said âwell I identify with the old brand, but not with the new brandâ, and then what do you say to them? âSorry, that brand is deprecatedâ doesnât feel like a good answer.
(I sort of imagine you agree with all of this, and by âchange the name of the movementâ you mean something obviously doable like getting a lot of web content and orgs and events and local groups to switch over to a new name. My claim is that thatâs probably better conceived of in terms of its constituent actions than in terms of changing the name of the movement.)
Thanks, that makes sense!
Yeah, itâs an unfortunate phrasing. Often when people, especially authorities, say that they feel that something is not on the table, theyâre in-effect declaring that it is off the table, while avoiding the responsibility of explaining why. Which probably was not intended, but still came across as a bit uncool. Itâs like: canât we just figure out whether itâs a good idea, and then decide whether to put it on the table?
Definitely didnât mean to shut down conversation! I felt like I had a strong feeling that it was not an option on the table (because of something like coherence reasonsâcf. my reply to Jonasânot because it seemed like a bad or too-difficult idea). But I hadnât unpacked my feeling. I also wasnât sure whether I needed to, or whether when I posted everyone would say something like âoh, yeah, sureâ and it would turn out to be a boring point. This was why I led with âI donât know how much of an outlier I amâ; I was trying to invite people to let me know if this was a boring triviality after it was pointed out, or if it was worth trying to unpack.
P.S. I appreciate having what seemed bad about the phrasing pointed out.
I am enjoying all this recent discussion on what we should be calling âeffective altruismâ.
As EA ideas become more common and get applied in a larger variety of contexts, it might be good to have different words that are context and audience specific. For example, âglobal prioritiesâ seems like a great name for the academic field, and it can be acknowledged that it is related to âeffective altruismâ the social movement which is, itself, clearly very distinct but still related to the LessWrong/âRationality community. Maybe policy orientated effective altruism needs its own name (clearly related to the academic field and social movement but distinct from it?). Similarly, maybe it is also okay for a broader appeal version of effective altruism to have a different name (this is maybe what the GWWC brand is moving towards?).
The effective altruism project is pretty broad and even if a large amount more thought had been put into the name, it still seems unlikely to me that one name could appeal to policy-makers, academics, the broader population and students/â people on the internet that both like to deeply philosophise about morality and base their lives around the conclusions of that philosophising.
I have some data that may be relevant to folks with interest in this topic*:
I work for CEA, and this quarter I did a small brand test with Rethinkâs help. We asked a sample of US college students if they had heard of âeffective altruism.â Some respondents were also asked to give a brief definition of EA and a Likert scale rating of how negative/âpositive their first impression was of âeffective altruism.â
Students who had never heard of âeffective altruismâ before the survey still had positive associations with it. Comments suggested that they thought it sounded good - effectiveness means doing things well; altruism means kindness and helping people. (IIRC, the average Likert scale score was 4+ out of 5). There were a small number of critiques too, but fewer than we expected. (Sorry that this is just a high-level summaryâwe donât have a full writeup ready yet.)
Caveats: We didnât test the name âeffective altruismâ against other possible names. Impressions will probably vary by audience. It could still be the case that âEAâ puts off a sub-set of the audience we really want to reach. (E.g. if we found that highly critical/âtruth-seeking people in certain fields were often turned away by âEA,â Iâd consider that a concern. We donât have that data).
I do think this is encouraging, but doesnât settle the question. Testing other brands and sub-brands may still be a good idea. Testing brands within very specific sub-audiences is also harder to do. CEA is currently considering trying to hire someone to test and develop the EA brand, and help field media inquiries.
*I think this post may have been written after I gave Max the info that he posted on my behalf here so Iâm cross-posting.
This is great, Iâll put a note in the main post highlighting this when I get home.
As noted in my other comment, I think you make great points, though I also think that we should probably not spend too much energy specifically pitting âeffective altruismâ against âglobal prioritiesâ before weâve thought about more names and what our goals are.
Those things being said, here are three additional points Iâd make in favour of âeffective altruismâ over âglobal prioritiesâ, which I think are related but somewhat distinct from what youâve said:
Another specific reason why a âglobal approachâ or âglobal prioritiesâ arenât necessarily what all EAs should focus on (even within their âaltruistic budgetsâ of time, money, etc.) is comparative advantage. To elaborate: There are some cases in which something like âcharity starts at homeâ makes sense, because there are cases in which âlocal issuesâ are easier for a person to learn about, form connections relevant to, gain influence over, and/âor get motivated about.
I mainly have in mind âlocalâ at a national or regional level, rather than e.g. individual cities.
E.g., I think people from the EU who want to influence AI policy are often/âusually better off influencing EU AI policy rather than US AI policy. And this is despite the fact that I think US AI policy is in general substantially more important to influence on the margin.
Open Phil make a similar argument for making US policy a major focus area (though Iâm not sure I fully endorse all their priorities there, personally).
This still requires prioritisation (e.g., donât just jump to working on improving education in oneâs city because thatâs what one has already heard about), but pushes against just picking global priorities, or even things that are global priorities on the margin (so account for neglectedness) in general.
I think âusing evidence and reason to do the most good possibleâ really is a great slogan-length encapsulation of the aims of EA, from my perspective. Relatedly, I think the âcombining the head and the heartâ framing seems appropriate to me (and also compelling to me personally, though that data point seems less relevant). And âeffective altruismâ lines up neatly with each of those two-part framings.
I think this aligns closely with a bunch of things you already said. To some extent, this may just be a different way of framing some points you made.
I think âglobal prioritiesâ doesnât strongly imply actually taking any actions (whether large-scale or individual). It sounds more naturally like it focuses on research.
EA is already often perceived as too research-focused, so it might be good to avoid things that would exacerbate that.
Thank you for this post. This is a really fascinating discussion. Iâm not entirely sure which âsideâ I end up on (or, of course, maybe thereâs another name that would be better than both that hasnât been proposed). At first I wasnât sure, but I might agree that GP sounds more arrogant than EA. Or at least theyâre both pretty close.
Honestly, this whole debateâand similar recent onesâ has made me very confused about what EA is at the moment. I look back to the pitch that I gave my college roommate about doing more good by being thoughtful and deliberative about charities and I wonder how much longer that will be (should be, can be) the EA (GP?) pitch. I wonder how I wouldâve reacted to a GP pitch about researching and engaging in ostensible global priorities over the âyou can help a lot of people and isnât that goodâ pitch.
I think EA sometimes tries to have it all. Like, it wants to be everything and to be compatible with all (or most) worldviews. But it seems to me that if you want to be an âinternational social movementâ then you probably canât be Global Priorities, because that (I would argue) is pretty arrogant and exclusive. However, if you want to have more of a research/âprioritization focus and less on things like individual donors, well, then Effective Altruism might not cut it either.
So, what is EA? Is it about donating? Going vegan? Getting an impactful job? Doing high-level research into cause X? Is it movement focused or is it research focused?
My intuition is that you canât be all of this. Or, at the very least, we donât have the bandwidth for all of this.
Iâm very confused about this, does anyone have a way to resolve this at least a little?
I think it can be all of this, and much more. EA can have tremendous capacity for issuing broad recommendations and tailored advice to individual people. It can be about philosophy, governance, technology, and lifestyle.
How could we have a movement for effective altruism if we couldnât encompass all that?
This is a community, not a think tank, and a movement rather than an institution. It goes beyond any one thing. So to join it or explain itâthatâs a little like explaining what America is all about, or Catholicism is all about, or science is all about. You donât just explain it, you live it, and the journey will look different to different people. Thatâs a feature, not a bug.
Thanks for this response! This is helpful, but I still have uncertainties.
Take conferences as an example. Conferences can only be about so much, obviously given their limited time and bandwidth. Should we expect that EA conferences in the next ten years (letâs say) will have all of these things? That Session A will be about how veganism is necessary (or unnecessary) and that Session B will be about how it only makes sense to focus on the longterm?
I think it seems possible that youâre right, but also EA is still very young and has already changed a lot in its short time on Earth. So, I think itâs reasonable to assume that it will continue to change, and I think we canât easily say that it will or wonât change in a way that becomes far less interested in lifestyle issues and far more interested in really big, cerebral questions about the future, cause x, and so on. Anecdotally, I think itâs fair to notice that EA is moving in this direction a bit already. Why would we think that it wonât continue to? The proportion of EA that is interested in lifestyle vs metaethics vs whatever else is not destined to be the same proportion forever, right? And therefore the content of the movement will change.
Some of this disagreement might come down to the earlier forum debate of EA as a question vs an ideology. I view it as an ideology and very much not as something that you live in the way that you describe. But that strikes me as an agree to disagree-type situation.
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