I think that leaders in EA organisations are more likely to belong to the former category, of people inspired by EA as a question. But as I discussed in this post, there can be a tradeoff between interest in EA itself versus interest in the things EA deems important. Personally I prioritise making others care about the worldview more than making them care about the question: caring about the question pushes you to do the right thing in the abstract, but caring about the worldview seems better at pushing you towards its most productive frontiers. This seems analogous to how the best scientists are more obsessed with the thing they’re studying than the downstream effects of their research.
Anyway, take all this with a grain of salt; it’s not a particularly firm opinion, just one personal perspective. But one longstanding EA I was talking to recently found it surprising, so I thought it’d be worth sharing in case others do too.
* As one datapoint: since the EA forum has been getting more users over time, a given karma score is more impressive the older a post is. Helen’s post is twice as old as any other post with comparable or higher karma, making it a strong outlier.
Not endorsed by me, personally. I wouldn’t call someone “not EA-aligned” if they disagreed about all of the worldview claims you made, but really care about understanding if someone is genuinely trying to answer the Question.
There’s an old EA forum post called Effective Altruism is a question (not an ideology) by Helen Toner, which I think has been pretty influential.*
But I was recently thinking about how the post rings false for me personally. I know that many people in EA are strongly motivated by the idea of doing the most good. But I was personally first attracted to an underlying worldview composed of stories about humanity’s origins, the rapid progress we’ve made, the potential for the world to be much better, and the power of individuals to contribute to that; from there, given potentially astronomical stakes, altruism is a natural corollary.
I think that leaders in EA organisations are more likely to belong to the former category, of people inspired by EA as a question. But as I discussed in this post, there can be a tradeoff between interest in EA itself versus interest in the things EA deems important. Personally I prioritise making others care about the worldview more than making them care about the question: caring about the question pushes you to do the right thing in the abstract, but caring about the worldview seems better at pushing you towards its most productive frontiers. This seems analogous to how the best scientists are more obsessed with the thing they’re studying than the downstream effects of their research.
Anyway, take all this with a grain of salt; it’s not a particularly firm opinion, just one personal perspective. But one longstanding EA I was talking to recently found it surprising, so I thought it’d be worth sharing in case others do too.
* As one datapoint: since the EA forum has been getting more users over time, a given karma score is more impressive the older a post is. Helen’s post is twice as old as any other post with comparable or higher karma, making it a strong outlier.
See also: Effective Altruism is an Ideology not (just) a Question.
Not endorsed by me, personally. I wouldn’t call someone “not EA-aligned” if they disagreed about all of the worldview claims you made, but really care about understanding if someone is genuinely trying to answer the Question.