I think it’s almost certainly possible to change the name of the movement if we want to – 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 community’s 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/cost ratio. It seems pretty likely to me that other priorities should be higher up on the list. This is why I also emphasized the “use of different labels in different contexts” more than the suggestion that we should rebrand EA in my original post.
(Perhaps that’s what you meant with “not an option on the table”? I felt sad when reading that because I understood it as pessimism about EA’s ability to coordinate, which I think hasn’t really been attempted very well yet.)
Hmm, no, I didn’t mean something that feels like pessimism about coordination ability, but that (roughly speaking) thing you get if you try to execute a “change the name of the movement” operation is not the same movement with a different name, but a different (albeit heavily overlapping) movement with the new name. And so it’s 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 don’t think that’s true if the name change is minor so that the connotations are pretty similar. I think that switching from “effective altruism” to “efficient do-gooding” is a switch which could more or less happen (you’d 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 “effective altruism, now usually called efficient do-gooding” 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 “global priorities” with quite different connotations, I think that it would change people’s relationship with the ideas, and you would probably find a significant group of people who said “well I identify with the old brand, but not with the new brand”, and then what do you say to them? “Sorry, that brand is deprecated” doesn’t feel like a good answer.
(I sort of imagine you agree with all of this, and by “change the name of the movement” 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 that’s probably better conceived of in terms of its constituent actions than in terms of changing the name of the movement.)
Yeah, it’s an unfortunate phrasing. Often when people, especially authorities, say that they feel that something is not on the table, they’re 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. It’s like: can’t we just figure out whether it’s a good idea, and then decide whether to put it on the table?
Definitely didn’t 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 reasons—cf. my reply to Jonas—not because it seemed like a bad or too-difficult idea). But I hadn’t unpacked my feeling. I also wasn’t sure whether I needed to, or whether when I posted everyone would say something like “oh, yeah, sure” and it would turn out to be a boring point. This was why I led with “I don’t know how much of an outlier I am”; 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 think it’s almost certainly possible to change the name of the movement if we want to – 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 community’s 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/cost ratio. It seems pretty likely to me that other priorities should be higher up on the list. This is why I also emphasized the “use of different labels in different contexts” more than the suggestion that we should rebrand EA in my original post.
(Perhaps that’s what you meant with “not an option on the table”? I felt sad when reading that because I understood it as pessimism about EA’s ability to coordinate, which I think hasn’t really been attempted very well yet.)
Hmm, no, I didn’t mean something that feels like pessimism about coordination ability, but that (roughly speaking) thing you get if you try to execute a “change the name of the movement” operation is not the same movement with a different name, but a different (albeit heavily overlapping) movement with the new name. And so it’s 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 don’t think that’s true if the name change is minor so that the connotations are pretty similar. I think that switching from “effective altruism” to “efficient do-gooding” is a switch which could more or less happen (you’d 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 “effective altruism, now usually called efficient do-gooding” 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 “global priorities” with quite different connotations, I think that it would change people’s relationship with the ideas, and you would probably find a significant group of people who said “well I identify with the old brand, but not with the new brand”, and then what do you say to them? “Sorry, that brand is deprecated” doesn’t feel like a good answer.
(I sort of imagine you agree with all of this, and by “change the name of the movement” 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 that’s 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, it’s an unfortunate phrasing. Often when people, especially authorities, say that they feel that something is not on the table, they’re 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. It’s like: can’t we just figure out whether it’s a good idea, and then decide whether to put it on the table?
Definitely didn’t 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 reasons—cf. my reply to Jonas—not because it seemed like a bad or too-difficult idea). But I hadn’t unpacked my feeling. I also wasn’t sure whether I needed to, or whether when I posted everyone would say something like “oh, yeah, sure” and it would turn out to be a boring point. This was why I led with “I don’t know how much of an outlier I am”; 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.