I’ve been struggling to reconciling similar beliefs described in the post since reading How to Create a Vegan World, which seems to describe a surprisingly different model to current meta-EA strategy, and I think your reframe makes sense. Tobias talks a lot about the journey that potential vegans take, which could be equivalent to first ‘incrementally’ doing the most good and normalizing taking an EA approach to specific causes or areas of one’s life.
Also, anecdotally, I’m also someone who took that path but wants EA to be more ‘big tent!’
The interesting thing about the strategy described in “How to create a vegan world” is that it would encourage people who don’t think about morality at all to start eating more plant-based foods. I think if EA really executed on the content of my post, this could happen with charitable giving. Imagine if we were able to get 10% of the population of developed countries to think of effectiveness when they thought about charities or charitable giving, within their chosen cause area. Maybe it would shift the funding landscape just enough so that more effective charities within a cause area have better SEO and show up first on a Google search. That’s what I would love to see.
I clearly need to read “How to Create a Vegan World”! Adding it to my reading list.
I certainly want to live in a vegan world, i.e. one where the wellbeing of non-human animals is considered equally to people. But I’m not sure I want to live in an “EA world.” Maybe that’s a failure of my own imagination, but it’s hard for me to even think about what that would look like...
As a “Big Tent EA”, I’d like to see EA grow, not only to increase it’s impact in a strict sense of scale, but also reform, refine, and expand on its ideas. There are certain EA values that I’d like to see become universal — generally various expansions of the moral circle, e.g. cosmopolitanism, veganism, longtermism — but I’m not as sure about widespread adoption of the movement. Does a world where everyone’s moral circle is a bit larger have to be an “EA world?”
I think I agree with this.
I’ve been struggling to reconciling similar beliefs described in the post since reading How to Create a Vegan World, which seems to describe a surprisingly different model to current meta-EA strategy, and I think your reframe makes sense. Tobias talks a lot about the journey that potential vegans take, which could be equivalent to first ‘incrementally’ doing the most good and normalizing taking an EA approach to specific causes or areas of one’s life.
Also, anecdotally, I’m also someone who took that path but wants EA to be more ‘big tent!’
The interesting thing about the strategy described in “How to create a vegan world” is that it would encourage people who don’t think about morality at all to start eating more plant-based foods. I think if EA really executed on the content of my post, this could happen with charitable giving. Imagine if we were able to get 10% of the population of developed countries to think of effectiveness when they thought about charities or charitable giving, within their chosen cause area. Maybe it would shift the funding landscape just enough so that more effective charities within a cause area have better SEO and show up first on a Google search. That’s what I would love to see.
I clearly need to read “How to Create a Vegan World”! Adding it to my reading list.
I certainly want to live in a vegan world, i.e. one where the wellbeing of non-human animals is considered equally to people. But I’m not sure I want to live in an “EA world.” Maybe that’s a failure of my own imagination, but it’s hard for me to even think about what that would look like...
As a “Big Tent EA”, I’d like to see EA grow, not only to increase it’s impact in a strict sense of scale, but also reform, refine, and expand on its ideas. There are certain EA values that I’d like to see become universal — generally various expansions of the moral circle, e.g. cosmopolitanism, veganism, longtermism — but I’m not as sure about widespread adoption of the movement. Does a world where everyone’s moral circle is a bit larger have to be an “EA world?”