It would protect the movement to have a norm that organizations must supply good evidence of effectiveness to the group and only if the group accepts this evidence should they claim to be an effective altruism organization.
I think some similar norm should also extend to individual people who want to publish articles about what effective altruism is. Obviously, this cannot be required of critics, but we can easily demand it from our allies. I’m not sure what we should expect individual people to do before they go out and write articles about effective altruism on Huffington Post or whatever, but expecting something seems necessary.
To prevent startups from being utterly ostracized by this before they’ve got enough data / done enough experiments to show effectiveness, maybe they could be encouraged to use a different term that includes EA but modifies it in a clear way like “aspiring effective altruism organization”.
It would protect the movement to have a norm that organizations must supply good evidence of effectiveness to the group and only if the group accepts this evidence should they claim to be an effective altruism organization.
I think some similar norm should also extend to individual people who want to publish articles about what effective altruism is. Obviously, this cannot be required of critics, but we can easily demand it from our allies. I’m not sure what we should expect individual people to do before they go out and write articles about effective altruism on Huffington Post or whatever, but expecting something seems necessary.
To prevent startups from being utterly ostracized by this before they’ve got enough data / done enough experiments to show effectiveness, maybe they could be encouraged to use a different term that includes EA but modifies it in a clear way like “aspiring effective altruism organization”.