I agree that the name needs to be changed. I’m surprised there was so little consistent pushback after Scott Alexander’s article.
Especially now that travel/food funding is going to be curtailed, it is clear that EA Global is primarily designed to bring together elite, credentialed, or wealthy people in the movement who have connections and will use the event for networking. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as often those types of people can have outsized impact. However I’m a firm believer that to maximize our effectiveness, Effective Altruism as a whole needs to start making itself more attractive to the general populace.
Even though we’ve had a lot of success carving out a niche space in the altruism community, the worldwide market for charity and ‘do-gooding’ makes EA look like a tiny unimportant blip. Even just in America, there was a total of $471 billion dollars given to charity last year. Instead of courting billionaires we need to be courting the folks who already donate, just ineffectively.
Instead of courting billionaires we need to be courting the folks who already donate, just ineffectively.
Without explicitly running the numbers, my guess is that billionaires count as ‘folks who already donate’. In fact, enough (US) billionaires have promised to give away >50% of their money that I wouldn’t be surprised if, as a class, they gave away a higher percentage than the population as a whole.
I agree that the name needs to be changed. I’m surprised there was so little consistent pushback after Scott Alexander’s article.
Especially now that travel/food funding is going to be curtailed, it is clear that EA Global is primarily designed to bring together elite, credentialed, or wealthy people in the movement who have connections and will use the event for networking. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as often those types of people can have outsized impact. However I’m a firm believer that to maximize our effectiveness, Effective Altruism as a whole needs to start making itself more attractive to the general populace.
Even though we’ve had a lot of success carving out a niche space in the altruism community, the worldwide market for charity and ‘do-gooding’ makes EA look like a tiny unimportant blip. Even just in America, there was a total of $471 billion dollars given to charity last year. Instead of courting billionaires we need to be courting the folks who already donate, just ineffectively.
Without explicitly running the numbers, my guess is that billionaires count as ‘folks who already donate’. In fact, enough (US) billionaires have promised to give away >50% of their money that I wouldn’t be surprised if, as a class, they gave away a higher percentage than the population as a whole.