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.)
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!