Effective altruism has become a think tank of endless debate—people arguing about which cause deserves the top spot while the world keeps burning.
This seems quite false to me? My impression is most people are busy working on their specific cause areas. Relatively little time is spent arguing for one major cause area over another. (This post, of course, fits into that category).
We need to align on one clear, shared goal—something tangible that unites the major cause areas and shows what coordinated altruism can actually do. Otherwise, this movement will slip into obscurity.
This also seems false to me. EA has not had one single object-level objective for the previous 15 years and it does not seem to have caused obscurity slippage thus far, and it’s not clear why we should expect this to change.
Yes, people are definitely doing things. But it also seems that there’s this higher level thing that everyone is worried about even if they’re not specifically working on it, and that thing is: that the world is basically set to implode (climate, deadly pandemic, war, etc.). I’m imagining aligning on that higher level goal, even if we’re all still doing other things as well (because if humanity doesn’t survive, then…oops).
Just because EA hasn’t aligned before doesn’t mean it couldn’t be very beneficial! If we could all see that our individual causes are in fact linked by one greater cause, it could be incredibly powerful.
This seems quite false to me? My impression is most people are busy working on their specific cause areas. Relatively little time is spent arguing for one major cause area over another. (This post, of course, fits into that category).
This also seems false to me. EA has not had one single object-level objective for the previous 15 years and it does not seem to have caused obscurity slippage thus far, and it’s not clear why we should expect this to change.
Yes, people are definitely doing things. But it also seems that there’s this higher level thing that everyone is worried about even if they’re not specifically working on it, and that thing is: that the world is basically set to implode (climate, deadly pandemic, war, etc.). I’m imagining aligning on that higher level goal, even if we’re all still doing other things as well (because if humanity doesn’t survive, then…oops).
Just because EA hasn’t aligned before doesn’t mean it couldn’t be very beneficial! If we could all see that our individual causes are in fact linked by one greater cause, it could be incredibly powerful.