This type of reasoning seems to imply that everyone interested in the flourishing of beings and thinking about that from an EA perspective should focus on projects that contribute directly to AI safety. I take that to be the implication of your comment because it is your main argument against working on something else (and could equally be applied to any number of projects discussed on the EA Forum not just this one). That implies, to me at least, extremely high confidence in AI safety being the most important issue because at lower confidence we would want to encourage a wider range of bets by those who share our intellectual and ideological views.
If the implication I’m drawing from your comment matches your views and confidence, can you help me understand why you are so confident in this being the most important issue?
If I’m misunderstanding the implication of your comment, can you help me understand where I’m confused?
While I think this post was useful to have shared and this is a topic that is worth discussing, I want to throw out a potential challenge that seems at least worth considering: perhaps the name “effective altruism” is not the true underlying issue here?
My (subjective, anecdotal) experience is that topics like this crop up every so often. Topics “like this” refer to things like:
concerns about the name of the movement/community/set of ideas,
concerns about respected people adjacent to the movement not wanting to associate with “effective altruism” in some way and,
discussions of potential other movements (for example having a separate long-term focused movement) and names (see comments about Global Priorities instead)
I wonder if some of what is underpinning these discussions is less the accuracy or branding issues of particular names and more the difficulty of coordinating a growing community?
As the number of people interested in the ideas associated with effective altruism grows, more people enter the space with different values and interpretations of the various ideas. It becomes harder for everyone to get what they wanted from the community and less likely that all those involved agree that things are moving in a positive direction.
My concern would be that even one were to wave a magic wand and successfully rebrand the movement to a new name at some point the same issues would arise when people again began to feel dissatisfied with something about the movement (or how others perceive it) and start casting around for a solution. Unfortunately, I think the solution is unlikely to be one of branding but might instead require us to figure out a lot more about what the goals of this endeavor are and how to successfully coordinate large groups of people who will inevitably have competing values and viewpoints.