To me, the core EA principles that I refer to when talking about the community and its ideas (and the terms I use for them) are:
Cosmopolitanism: The same thing that CEA means by “impartiality.” Beings that I have no connection to are no less ethically important than my friends, family, or countrymen.
Evidence orientation: I think this is basically what CEA calls “Scout mindset.”
Attention to costs and cost-effectiveness: The same thing that CEA calls “Recognition of tradeoffs”
Commensurability of different outcomes: GiveWell, Open Philanthropy, and others make explicit judgments of how many income doublings for a family (for example) are equivalent to one under-5 life saved, or similar. This enables you to do “cause prioritization”—without it, you get into an “apples to oranges” problem in a lot of resource allocation questions.
I like CEA’s explicit highlighting of “Scope sensitivity”—I will embrace that in future conversations. But I’m writing this post to highlight outcome commensurability too. I think it is the one principle that most differentiates EA-aligned international development practitioners from other international development practitioners who have a firm grounding in economics.
To me, the core EA principles that I refer to when talking about the community and its ideas (and the terms I use for them) are:
Cosmopolitanism: The same thing that CEA means by “impartiality.” Beings that I have no connection to are no less ethically important than my friends, family, or countrymen.
Evidence orientation: I think this is basically what CEA calls “Scout mindset.”
Attention to costs and cost-effectiveness: The same thing that CEA calls “Recognition of tradeoffs”
Commensurability of different outcomes: GiveWell, Open Philanthropy, and others make explicit judgments of how many income doublings for a family (for example) are equivalent to one under-5 life saved, or similar. This enables you to do “cause prioritization”—without it, you get into an “apples to oranges” problem in a lot of resource allocation questions.
I like CEA’s explicit highlighting of “Scope sensitivity”—I will embrace that in future conversations. But I’m writing this post to highlight outcome commensurability too. I think it is the one principle that most differentiates EA-aligned international development practitioners from other international development practitioners who have a firm grounding in economics.