Definitely agree that “opportunity to do good” is more convincing than “obligation to do good”. What we meant here wasn’t that everyone has a moral obligation to organize, though I can see that formulation wasn’t super clear. The idea behind “obligation to organize” is something analogous to the GWWC pledge or joining 80,000 hours: a formal commitment EAs can make to do good in a particular way.
SophieHermanns
Karma: 5
One of the benefits of political organizing is that many people can do it in a way that mostly uses their free time, rather than their productive time. Calling a political representative, going to a protest or hosting a meeting are all activities most people can do on top of their careers and donations. The relative costs and benefits here will be different for different people—if political organizing would cut into time and energy you would otherwise spend on e.g. EA research projects, it might not be worth it for you.
The way we’ve been thinking about this is less “EA as a movement/community endorses cause X” and more individual EAs engaging in political work that seems valuable to them. Many EAs did phone canvassing for Hillary Clinton or attended women’s marches around Trump’s inauguration, all without there being some official EA position on US politics. I think EAs are actually remarkably good at disagreeing with each other—we already respect that we support different causes and make different career and lifestyle choices. EAs canvassing in the US election didn’t lead to fallouts within the community between Sanders, Clinton or Republican supporters.
There could be quite high value in EAs engaging people who work in social justice, precisely because of some the disagreements you mentioned. I work a lot with people who would describe themselves as committed to social justice and I find that although there are things I find irritating (like disregard for quantitative approaches) there’s also lots of common ground: wanting to alleviate suffering, willingness to make personal sacrifices for causes, convergence on particular policy issues. Working with them and constructively making a case for eg. more evidence-based approaches could be productive. Plus, I’ve definitely learned, too, from being exposed to very different ways of thinking about issues I care about.