Thanks! Reading this again I realized that it could be connected with another idea, that the outcome-oriented communities within the larger feelings-oriented community need to be explicit. The greater the focus on outcome, the greater the need for explicit membership. Again, an analogy:
Within a church, although there is a definition of who is a believer, and there are some norms for the believers; in reality there are different levels of beliefs, some minor sins are frequent and mostly ignored in practice, although people are reminded that those are sins. There are some conditions for joining: it’s not enough that you are a nice person and we like you; you must also be willing to publicly profess our beliefs. If you refuse to profess them, you are not our member. But if you join, then keep sinning, but continue to profess our beliefs, you can remain a member. Because hypocrisy is a part of human nature, and it has a useful role in the society: even the hypocrites create some moral pressure on the remaining members. Actually, maybe hypocritically professing the beliefs is the most important thing the average members do.
Then we have the professionals or paraprofessionals: priests, theology professors, monks and nuns, public speakers, etc. These are considered the core, the high-status people within the church. Although they are numerically a minority, they speak in the name of the church; an average member is not considered an official speaker of the church. Membership in these groups is verified, publicly. -- You can falsely pretend to be a Catholic, and most people will not notice. But you can’t pretend to be a Catholic priest and start giving a public sermon in a Catholic church. You can write a Catholic blog, but you can’t write a pastoral letter and have it read in all churches.
Creating an analogy for the Effective Altruism movement would require having a set of official speakers for the whole movement. (At this moment, any organization with costly membership could play the role.) These speakers would have to officially announce a set of basic beliefs; easy enough that any person can understand them without having a specific education. It does not need to be perfect; it needs to be simple, and barely specific enough to describe the movement. Something like: “We want to help other people. We care about the real impact of our help. We try to donate as much as we can, and to choose the charities with the largest impact.” The important thing is not being too specific here. Don’t mention QALY’s or Africa at this phase. Every detail you add would drive a lot of people away. This is step one, where you want to have these beliefs professed as widely as possible. Later, in step two, you can explain people (who already made these beliefs part of their identity) how specifically these values can be maximized. Even then, there will be a few people who will ignore you. They are still useful for spreading the meme towards the others who may listen to you.
It is okay to have a lot of people who profess EA, but don’t do it. They still spread the memes. The important thing is to make it obvious who the real speakers for the movement are. Especially to uncover people who would try to use these memes for their benefits. When someone says: “I give money to cure sick puppies,” that’s not a big problem. (It’s like a Catholic who masturbates. There may be a sermon about this in the church once in a while, but no one is going to send an inquisition after them or excomunicate them. When people are ashamed to discuss it publicly, even if they continue doing it, the problem is pretty much solved. There are more important battles to pick.) It’s just when someone tries to defend their own charity by saying: “We are the effective charity”, and they are not, or if someone tries to redefine the movement, the official speakers have to make it really obvious that those people don’t speak for the EA movement.
An important role of the movement is to translate membership in outcome-oriented subgroups to social status. Believers respect the priests, which rewards priests socially for their work, and encourages a small minority of the believers to become new priests in the future. Analogically, if we had thousands of people who profess EA even if most of them don’t donate a penny, it is a good thing if one percent of them later decides to donate a lot, and if the one percent receives a huge social reward from the rest of the group for doing so. The lay people are a mechanism for translating work of the experts to status, they contribute to the work indirectly.
Thanks! Reading this again I realized that it could be connected with another idea, that the outcome-oriented communities within the larger feelings-oriented community need to be explicit. The greater the focus on outcome, the greater the need for explicit membership. Again, an analogy:
Within a church, although there is a definition of who is a believer, and there are some norms for the believers; in reality there are different levels of beliefs, some minor sins are frequent and mostly ignored in practice, although people are reminded that those are sins. There are some conditions for joining: it’s not enough that you are a nice person and we like you; you must also be willing to publicly profess our beliefs. If you refuse to profess them, you are not our member. But if you join, then keep sinning, but continue to profess our beliefs, you can remain a member. Because hypocrisy is a part of human nature, and it has a useful role in the society: even the hypocrites create some moral pressure on the remaining members. Actually, maybe hypocritically professing the beliefs is the most important thing the average members do.
Then we have the professionals or paraprofessionals: priests, theology professors, monks and nuns, public speakers, etc. These are considered the core, the high-status people within the church. Although they are numerically a minority, they speak in the name of the church; an average member is not considered an official speaker of the church. Membership in these groups is verified, publicly. -- You can falsely pretend to be a Catholic, and most people will not notice. But you can’t pretend to be a Catholic priest and start giving a public sermon in a Catholic church. You can write a Catholic blog, but you can’t write a pastoral letter and have it read in all churches.
Creating an analogy for the Effective Altruism movement would require having a set of official speakers for the whole movement. (At this moment, any organization with costly membership could play the role.) These speakers would have to officially announce a set of basic beliefs; easy enough that any person can understand them without having a specific education. It does not need to be perfect; it needs to be simple, and barely specific enough to describe the movement. Something like: “We want to help other people. We care about the real impact of our help. We try to donate as much as we can, and to choose the charities with the largest impact.” The important thing is not being too specific here. Don’t mention QALY’s or Africa at this phase. Every detail you add would drive a lot of people away. This is step one, where you want to have these beliefs professed as widely as possible. Later, in step two, you can explain people (who already made these beliefs part of their identity) how specifically these values can be maximized. Even then, there will be a few people who will ignore you. They are still useful for spreading the meme towards the others who may listen to you.
It is okay to have a lot of people who profess EA, but don’t do it. They still spread the memes. The important thing is to make it obvious who the real speakers for the movement are. Especially to uncover people who would try to use these memes for their benefits. When someone says: “I give money to cure sick puppies,” that’s not a big problem. (It’s like a Catholic who masturbates. There may be a sermon about this in the church once in a while, but no one is going to send an inquisition after them or excomunicate them. When people are ashamed to discuss it publicly, even if they continue doing it, the problem is pretty much solved. There are more important battles to pick.) It’s just when someone tries to defend their own charity by saying: “We are the effective charity”, and they are not, or if someone tries to redefine the movement, the official speakers have to make it really obvious that those people don’t speak for the EA movement.
An important role of the movement is to translate membership in outcome-oriented subgroups to social status. Believers respect the priests, which rewards priests socially for their work, and encourages a small minority of the believers to become new priests in the future. Analogically, if we had thousands of people who profess EA even if most of them don’t donate a penny, it is a good thing if one percent of them later decides to donate a lot, and if the one percent receives a huge social reward from the rest of the group for doing so. The lay people are a mechanism for translating work of the experts to status, they contribute to the work indirectly.