Maybe I am missing something here, but—given your post and your arguments—how does it follow that the EA movement should not endorse case-specific effective altruism?
If I understand the “EA mission” correctly, it is about doing the most good in total. The original poster seems to believe that EA endorsing case-specific effective altruism will do more good than if they don’t (overall). Hence, if you disagree, you should argue why it would be better for EA to not endorse this. Where am I making a mistake in this logic?
My own intuition (which I tried to hint at in my first post) is that any official endorsement of case-specific effective altruism on behalf of EA would take away too much from the core of EA to be worth it. YES, the world would be better, if everyone applied the EA core values to their own field, BUT ressources are too tight—or it might be too distracting -- to devote any attention to such “secondary” causes. (That being said, I am very much aware that my intuition might be wrong!)
Hi Ian,
Great and thought-provoking post. Thank you very much for taking the time to write it!
I will think about it and might respond at length later, but for now, let me ask you this: How do you propose the EA movement go about introducing “case-specific effective altruism”? Do you imagine several official sub-groups, each dedicated to a specific cause?* Or do you simply want EA to acknowledge that case-specific effective altruism is a good thing, so that people can set up their own domain-specific EA groups if they like?
In sum, a few words on your thoughts for actual implementation going forward, would be nice! :)
*It seems, that if you are advocating that the EA movement actively pursues domain-specific effective altruism in a number of different domains, this would require a large amount of work from the group/community—work that will therefore not go into the (cause-neutral) traditional EA domain. For this reason alone, one could argue against this implementation (i.e. one could acknowledge that case-specific effective altruism would be a good thing, but still reject to actively do something about it, since the work load would be too high as compared to what you get out of it).