Richard, reading this piece with consideration of other pieces you’ve written/delivered about Effective Altruism, such as your Lessons from my time in Effective Altruism and your recent provocative talk at EA Global Boston lead me to wonder what it is (if anything) that leads you to self-identify as an Effective Altruist? There may not be any explicit EA shibboleth, but it seems to me to nevertheless entail a set of particular methods, and once you have moved beyond enough of them it may not make any sense to call oneself an Effective Altruist.
My mental model of EA has it intentionally operating at the margins, in the same way that arbitrageurs do, maximizing returns (specifically social ones) to a small number of actors willing to act not just in contrary fashion to but largely in isolation from the larger population. Once we recognize the wisdom of faith it seems to me we are moving back into the normie fold, and in that integration or synthesis the EA exclusivity habit may be a hindrance.
Richard, reading this piece with consideration of other pieces you’ve written/delivered about Effective Altruism, such as your Lessons from my time in Effective Altruism and your recent provocative talk at EA Global Boston lead me to wonder what it is (if anything) that leads you to self-identify as an Effective Altruist? There may not be any explicit EA shibboleth, but it seems to me to nevertheless entail a set of particular methods, and once you have moved beyond enough of them it may not make any sense to call oneself an Effective Altruist.
My mental model of EA has it intentionally operating at the margins, in the same way that arbitrageurs do, maximizing returns (specifically social ones) to a small number of actors willing to act not just in contrary fashion to but largely in isolation from the larger population. Once we recognize the wisdom of faith it seems to me we are moving back into the normie fold, and in that integration or synthesis the EA exclusivity habit may be a hindrance.