I’m looking to update the endorsements on effectivealtruism.org and wanted to crowdsource some suggestions. I am looking for people who are: well known to a wide (or EA adjacent) audience, credible and would want to endorse Effective Altruism.
I would particularly appreciate suggestions of people from underrepresented groups.
Some suggestions to kick off the discussion: Steven Pinker, Julia Galef, Sam Harris, Esther Duflo…
I don’t have an answer, but I would also be interested in a spreadsheet of “people who have supported EA” with loose measures on scales of 1–10 for things like “how widely known is this person,” “(roughly) how respected is this person’s opinions by their audience,” and “how much did they support EA?” The second one might be especially tricky since some people might have a very polarized reputation (e.g., Trump, Elon Musk). (Then again, it might also look kind of weird 😅)
^ A link to a mini-model of what I had in mind.
However, I’ll note that as I began making it, I started to see how representing the information could become quite complex or imprecise, so I began to become more skeptical of the value of this (although I think that even an over-simplified list could still be of some value/interest, even if it would have quite a few limitations and thus might just best serve as a quick-reference/encyclopedia). As an example of the limitations, like I mentioned before, consider a situation where someone has a positive reputation among one large group of people, but a negative reputation among another group of people.
I second Harrison D’s suggestion to create a spreadsheet of endorsements, since such a list might be useful to a number of EAs and EA orgs, beyond the specific task of updating effectivealtruism.org.
Sources that may point you in the right direction:
List of prominent members of Giving What We Can
List of people associated with effective altruism
List of Doing Good Better endorsements (perhaps also see media coverage)
Ezra Klein?
Thanks for the suggestions everyone. I’ve now made a long list in a spreadsheet of people but it doesn’t feel like a good idea to share it widely (I haven’t contacted these people and I don’t want to give the wrong impression about who has claimed to be affiliated). I’d be very happy to share on an individual basis—feel free to email me at ben.clifford@centreforeffectivealtruism.org
Just remembered an old list of suggested speakers for EA events that might include some fitting people:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FSHsvUNmmmtZ2fI_F3V8IZVjnxSeAORhr5LFr1vV5ZY/edit
What about Rutger Bregman, Dutch Historian and best selling author of ‘HumanKind’. For EA interview see here