Effective Altruists want to effectively help others. I think it makes perfect sense for this to be an umbrella movement that includes a range of different cause areas.  (And literally saving the world is obviously a legitimate area of interest for altruists!)

Cause-specific movements are great, but they aren't a replacement for EA as a cause-neutral movement to effectively do good.

The point about global poverty and longtermism being very different causes is a good one, and the idea of these things being more separate is interesting.

That said, I disagree with the idea that working to prevent existential catastrophe within one's own lifetime is selfish rather than altruistic. I suppose it's possible someone could work on x-risk out of purely selfish motivations, but it doesn't make much sense to me.

From a social perspective, people who work on climate change are considered altruistic even if they are doomy on climate change. People who perform activism on behalf of marginalised groups are considered altruistic even if they're part of that marginalised group themselves and thus even more clearly acting in their own self-interest.

From a mathematical perspective, consider AI alignment. What are the chances of me making the difference between "world saved" and "world ends" if I go into this field? Let's call it around one in a million, as a back-of-the-envelope figure. (Assuming AI risk at 10% this century, the AI safety field reducing it by 10%, and my performing 1/10,000th of the field's total output)

This is still sufficient to save 7,000 lives in expected value, so it seems a worthy bet. By contrast, what if, for some reason, misaligned AI would kill me and only me? Well, now I could devote my entire career to AI alignment and only reduce my chance of death by one micromort - by contrast, my Covid vaccine cost me three micromorts all by itself, and 20 minutes of moderate exercise gives a couple of micromorts back. Thus, working on AI alignment is a really dumb idea if I care only about my own life. I would have to go up to at least 1% (10,000x better odds) to even consider doing this for myself.

William_MacAskill's comment on the Scott Alexander post explains his rational for leading with longermism over x-risk. Pasting it below so people don't have to click.

It's a tough question, but leading with x-risk seems like it could turn off a lot of people who have (mostly rightly, up until recently) gotten into the habit of ignoring doomsayers. Longtermism comes at it from a more positive angle, which seems more inspiring to me (x-risk seems to be more promoting acting out of fear to me). Longtermism is just more interesting as an idea to me as well. 

Is existential risk a more compelling intro meme than longtermism?

My main take is: What meme is good for which people is highly dependent on the person and the context (e.g., the best framing to use in a back-and-forth conversation may be different from one in a viral tweet). This favours diversity; having a toolkit of memes that we can use depending on what’s best in context.

I think it’s very hard to reason about which memes to promote, and easy to get it wrong from the armchair, for a bunch of reasons:

• It’s inherently unpredictable which memes do well.
• It’s incredibly context-dependent. To figure this out, the main thing is just about gathering lots of (qualitative and quantitative) data from the demographic you’re interacting with. The memes that resonate most with Ezra Klein podcast listeners are very different from those that resonant most with  Tyler Cowen podcast listeners, even though their listeners are very similar people compared to the wider world.  And even with respect to one idea, subtly different framings can have radically different audience reactions. (cf. “We care about future generations” vs “We care about the unborn.”)
• People vary a lot. Even within very similar demographics, some people can love one message while other people hate it.
• “Curse of knowledge” - when you’re really deep down the rabbit hole in a set of ideas, it’s really hard to imagine what it’s like being first exposed to those ideas.

Then, at least when we’re comparing (weak) longtermism with existential risk, it’s not obvious which resonates better in general. (If anything, it seems to me that (weak) longtermism does better.) A few reasons:

First, message testing from Rethink suggests that longtermism and existential risk have similarly-good reactions from the educated general public, and AI risk doesn’t do great. The three best-performing messages they tested were:

• “The current pandemic has shown that unforeseen events can have a devastating effect. It is imperative that we prepare both for pandemics and other risks which could threaten humanity's long-term future.”
• “In any year, the risk from any given threat might be small - but the odds that your children or grandchildren will face one of them is uncomfortably high.”
• “It is important to ensure a good future not only for our children's children, but also the children of their children.”

So people actually pretty like messages that are about unspecified, and not necessarily high-probability threats, to the (albeit nearer-term) future.

As terms to describe risk, “global catastrophic risk” and “long-term risk” did the best, coming out a fair amount better than “existential risk”.

They didn’t test a message about AI risk specifically.  The related thing was how much the government should prepare for different risks (pandemics, nuclear, etc), and AI came out worst among about 10 (but I don’t think that tells us very much).

Second, most media reception of WWOTF has been pretty positive so far. This is based mainly on early reviews (esp trade reviews), podcast and journalistic interviews, and the recent profiles (although the New Yorker profile was mixed). Though there definitely has been some pushback (especially on Twitter), I think it’s overall been dwarfed by positive articles. And the pushback I have gotten is on the Elon endorsement, association between EA and billionaires, and on standard objections to utilitarianism — less so to the idea of longtemism itself. 

Third, anecdotally at least, a lot of people just hate the idea of AI risk (cf Twitter), thinking of it as a tech bro issue, or doomsday cultism. This has been coming up in the twitter response to WWOTF, too, even though existential risk from AI takeover is only a small part of the book. And this is important, because I’d think that the median view among people working on x-risk (including me) is that the large majority of the risk comes from AI rather than bio or other sources. So “holy shit, x-risk” is mainly, “holy shit, AI risk”. 

Do neartermists and longtermists agree on what’s best to do?

Here I want to say: maybe. (I personally don’t think so, but YMMV.) But even if you do believe that, I think that’s a very fragile state of affairs, which could easily change as more money and attention flows into x-risk work, or if our evidence changes, and I don’t want to place a lot of weight on it.  (I do strongly believe that global catastrophic risk is enormously important even in the near term, and a sane world would be doing far, far better on it, even if everyone only cared about the next 20 years.)

More generally, I get nervous about any plan that isn’t about promoting what we fundamentally believe or care about (or a weaker version of what we fundamentally believe or care about, which is “on track” to the things we do fundamentally believe or care about).

What I mean by “promoting what we fundamentally believe or care about”:

• Promoting goals rather than means. This means that (i) if the environment changes (e.g. some new transformative tech comes along, or the political environment changes dramatically, like war breaks out) or (ii) if our knowledge changes (e.g. about the time until transformative AIs, or about what actions to take), then we’ll take different means to pursue our goals. I think this is particularly important for something like AI, but also true more generally.
• Promoting the ideas that you believe most robustly - i.e. that you think you are least likely to change in the coming 10 years. Ideally these things aren’t highly conjunctive or relying on speculative premises. This makes it less likely that you will realise that you’ve been wasting your time or done active harm by promoting wrong ideas in ten years’ time. (Of course, this will vary from person to person. I think that (weak) longtermism is really robustly true and neglected, and I feel bullish about promoting it. For others, the thing that might feel really robustly true is “TAI is a BFD and we’re not thinking about it enough” - I suspect that many people feel they more robustly believe this than longtermism.)

Examples of people promoting means rather than goals, and this going wrong:

• “Eat less meat because it’s good for your health” -> people (potentially) eat less beef and more chicken.
• “Stop nuclear power” (in the 70s) -> environmentalists hate nuclear power, even though it’s one of the best bits of clean tech we have.

Examples of how this could go wrong by promoting “holy shit x-risk”:

• We miss out on non-x-risk ways of promoting a good long-run future:
  • E.g. the risk that we solve the alignment problem but AI is used to lock in highly suboptimal values. (Personally, I think a large % of future expected value is lost in this way.)
• We highlight the importance of AI to people who are not longtermist. They realise how transformatively good it could be for them and for the present generation (a digital immortality of bliss!) if AI is aligned, and they think the risk of misalignment is small compared to the benefits. They become AI-accelerationists (a common view among Silicon Valley types).
• AI progress slows considerably in the next 10 years, and actually near-term x-risk doesn’t seem so high. Rather than doing whatever the next-best longtermist thing is, the people who came in via “holy shit x-risk” people just do whatever instead, and the people who promoted the “holy shit x-risk” meme get a bad reputation.

So, overall my take is:

• “Existential risk” and “longtermism” are both important ideas that deserve greater recognition in the world.
• My inclination is to prefer promoting “longtermism” because that’s closer to what I fundamentally believe (in the sense I explain above), and it’s nonobvious to me which plays better PR-wise, and it’s probably highly context-dependent.
• Let’s try promoting them both, and see how they each catch on.

I agree that Effective Altruism and the existential risk prevention movement are not the same thing. Let me use this as an opportunity to trot out my Venn diagrams again. The point is that these  communities and ideas overlap but don't necessarily imply each other - you don't have to agree to all of them because you agree with one of them, and there are good people doing good work in all the segments.

If you believe that existential risk is the highest priority cause area by a significant margin - a belief that is only increasing in prominence - then the last thing you'd want to do is interfere with the EA -> existential risk pipeline.

That said, I'm hugely in favour of cause-specific movement building - it solves a lot of problems, such as picking up different people from the EA framing and makes it easier to spend more money running programs, just as you've said.

I agree that in practice x-risk involves different types of work and people than e.g. global poverty or animal welfare. I also agree that there is a danger of x-risk / long-termism cannibalizing the rest of the movement, and this might easily lead to bad-on-net things like effectively trading large amounts of non-x-risk work for very little x-risk / long-termist work (because the x-risk people would have done found their work anyway had x-risk been a smaller fraction of the movement, but as a consequence of x-risk preeminence a lot of other people are not sufficiently attracted to even start engaging with EA ideas).

However, I worry about something like intellectual honesty. Effective Altruism, both the term and the concept, are about effective forms of helping other people, and lots of people keep coming to the conclusion that preventing x-risks is one of the best ways of doing so. It seems almost intellectually dishonest to try to cut off or "hide" (in the weak sense of reducing the public salience of) the connection. One of the main strengths of EA is that it keeps pursuing that whole "impartial welfarist good" thing even if it leads to weird places, and I think EA should be open about the fact that it seems weird things follow from trying to do charity rigorously.

I think ideally this looks like global poverty, animal welfare, x-risk, and other cause areas all sitting under the EA umbrella, and engaged EAs in all of these areas being aware that the other causes are also things that people following EA principles have been drawn towards (and therefore prompted to weigh them against each other in their own decisions and cause prioritization). Of course this also requires that one cause area does not monopolize the EA image.

I agree with your concern about the combination seeming incongruous, but I think there are good ways to pitch this while tying them all into core EA ideas, e.g. something like:

If you start thinking quantitatively about how to do the most good, you might realize that some especially promising ways of doing good are are cases where

-there is clear evidence that a small amount of money goes far, like helping extremely poor people in developing countries

-some suffering has clearly not historically been taken into account, like animal welfare

-the stakes are absolutely huge, like plausible catastrophes that might affect the entire world

I think you also overestimate the cultural congruence between non-x-risk causes like, for example, global poverty and animal welfare. These concerns span from hard-nosed veteran economists who think everything vegan is hippy nonsense and only people matter morally, to young non-technical vegans with concern for everything right down to worms. Grouping these causes together only looks normal because you're so used to EA.

(likewise, I expect low weirdness gradients between x-risk and non-x-risk causes, e.g. nuclear risk reduction policy and developing-country economic development, or GCBRs and neglected diseases)

Thanks for contributing to one of the most important meta-EA discussions going on right now (c.f. this similar post)! I agree that there should be splinter movements that revolve around different purposes (e.g., x-risk reduction, effective giving) but I disagree that EA is no longer accurately described by 'effective altruism,' and so I disagree that EA should be renamed or that it should focus on  "people who want to help the less fortunate (humans or animals) to the best of their abilities, without anyone trying to be convince them that protecting the far future is the most altruistic cause area." I think this because

• The core pitch still gets you to effective giving and longtermism. I think the core pitch for EA is not "We have high-quality evidence to show that some charities are orders of magnitude more effective than others.  If you want do the most good with your money, you should find organizations that are seen and measured to be high impact by reputed organizations like GiveWell," but rather, using evidence & reason to maximize good ➡️ the scale/tractability/neglectedness framework.
  • This easily gets you to effective giving (cause prioritization + finding cost-effective interventions) but can also get you to longtermism. For an example pitch that does both, see UChicago's 2021 info presentation.
  • Of course, this might not be the right pitch for everyone! It seems reasonable that workplace groups might focus more on effective giving—but doing so would, I expect, make it harder to shift towards longtermism than the broader and more philosophical core pitch.
• EA appeals to a specific, distinct audience that isn't captured by a movement that is solely focused on existential risk or more near-term causes. Insofar as EA aspires to be a question, not an ideology, convening people who are interested in taking the fundamental assumptions of EA (cause prioritization etc.) and applying them to social impact seems crucial for sustainably finding answers to the question of, "how do we do the most good?" Without an umbrella movement, I would be concerned that it would be less likely that people with different knowledge and experiences would exchange ideas on how to do good, making it less likely that any given community would be able to quickly adapt to how priorities shift as the world changes.
• While EA might not be the best name or acronym, I think it does a decent job of capturing the underlying principles: prioritizing so we can be most effective when we aim to act altruistically.

I also think that EA community builders are doing a decent job of creating alternative pipelines, similar to your proposal for creating an x-risk movement. For example,

• Using different framings:  Simplify EA Pitches to "Holy Shit, X-Risk" ➡️ "Holy Shit, X-risk" talk
• Running x-risk specific retreats (e.g. GCP)
• Creating x-risk or cause-specific groups (e.g. Harvard-MIT X-Risk, AI safety university groups)
• GWWC's 2022 strategy, which revolves around the effective giving frame that still works as a great intro (or end-point!) for potential members of EA

There's still a lot more work to be done but I'm optimistic that we can create sub-movements without completely rebranding or shifting the EA movement away from longtermist causes!

But I sometimes have a fear in the back of my mind that some of the attendees who are intrigued by these ideas are later going to look up effective altruism, get the impression that the movement’s focus is just about existential risks these days, and feel duped.  Since EA pitches don’t usually start with longtermist ideas, it can feel like a bait and switch.

Do you have any evidence that this is happening? Feeling duped just seems like a bit of a stretch here. Animal welfare and global health still make up a large part of the effectivealtrusim.org home page. Givewell still ranks their top charities and their funds raised more than doubled from 2020 to 2021. 

My impression is that the movement does a pretty good job explaining that caring about the future doesn’t mean ignoring the present.

Assuming someone did feel duped, what are the range of results? 

1. Perhaps they would get over it and read more about longtermisim and the feeling would subside.
2. Perhaps they wouldn't and they'd just stick with whatever effective cause they would have otherwise donated to.
3. Perhaps some combination of the two over time (this was pretty much my trajectory).
4. Perhaps they'd think "These people are crazy, I'm gonna keep giving playpumps"

Kidding aside, the latter possibility seems like the least likely to me, and anyone in that bucket seems like a pretty bad candidate for EA in general. 

This post got me considering opening a Facebook group called "Against World Destruction Israel" or something like that (as a sibling to "Effective Altruism Israel")

Most of our material would be around prioritizing x-risks, because I think many people already care about x-risk, they're just focusing on the wrong ones.

As a secondary but still major point, "here are things you can do to help".

What do you (or others) think? (This is a rough idea after 2 minutes of thinking)

I found this very interesting to read, not because I agree with everything that was said (some bits I do, some bits I don't) but because I think someone should be saying it. 

I have had thoughts about the seeming divide between 'longtermism' vs 'shorttermism', when to me there seems to be a large overlap between the two, which kind of goes in line with what you mentioned: x-risk can occur within this lifetime, therefore you do not need to be convinced about longtermism to care about it. Even if future lives had no value (I'm not making that argument), and you only take into account current lives, preventing x-risk has a massive value because that is still nearly 8 billion people we are talking about!

Therefore I like the point that x-risk does not need to be altruistic. But it also very much can be, therefore having it separate from effective altruism is not needed:
1. I want to save as many people as possible therefore stopping extinction is good - altruism, and it is a good idea to do this as effectively as possible
2. I want to save myself from extinction - not altruism, but can lead to the same end therefore there can be a high benefit of promoting it this way to more general audiences

So I do not think that 'effective altruism' is the wrong name, as I think everyone so far I've come across in EA has been in the first category.  EA is also broader, including things like animal welfare and global health and poverty and various other areas to improve the lives on sentient beings (and I think this should be talked about more). I think EA is a good name for all of those things.

But if the goal is to reduce x-risk in any way possible, working with people who fall into the second category, who want to save themselves and their loved ones, is good. If we want large shifts in global policy and people generally to act a certain way, things need to be communicated to a general audience, and people should be encouraged to work on high impact things even if they are 'not aligned'.

GREAT post! Such a fantastic and thorough explanation of a truly troubling issue! Thank you for this.

We definitely need to distinguish what I call the various "flavors" of EA. And we have many options for how to organize this.

Personally, I'm torn because, on one hand, I want to bring everyone together still under an umbrella movement, with several "branches" within it. However, I agree that, as you note, this situation feels much more like the differences between the rationality community and the EA community: "the two have a lot of overlap but they are not the same thing and there are plenty of people who are in one but not the other. There’s also no good umbrella term that encompasses both." The EA movement and the extinction risk prevention movement are absolutely different.

And anecdotally, I really want to note that the people who are emphatically in one camp but not the other are very different people. So while I often want to bring them together harmoniously in a centralized community, I've honestly noticed that the two groups don't relate as well and sometimes even argue more than they collaborate. (Again, just anecdotal evidence here — nothing concrete, like data.) It's kind of like the people who represent these movements don't exactly speak the same language and don't exactly always share the same perspectives, values, worldviews, or philosophies. And that's OK! Haha, it's actually really necessary I think (and quite beautiful, in its own way).

I love the parallel you've drawn between the rationality community and the EA community. It's the perfect example: people have found their homes among 2 different forums and different global events and different organizations. People in the two communities have shared views and can reasonably expect people within to be familiar with the ideas, writings, and terms from within the group. (For example, someone in EA can reasonably expect someone else who claims any relation to the movement/community to know about 80000 Hours and have at least skimmed the "key ideas" article. Whereas people in the rationality community would reasonably expect everyone within it to have familiarity with HPMOR. But it's not necessarily expected that these expectations would carry across communities and among both movements.)

You've also pointed out amazing examples of how the motivations behind people's involvement vary greatly. And that's one of the strongest arguments for distinguishing communities; there are distinct subsets of core values. So, again, people don't always relate to each other across the wide variety of diverse cause areas and philosophies. And that's OK :)

Let's give people a proper home — somewhere they feel like they truly belong and aren't constantly questioning if they belong. Anecdotally I've seen so many of my friends struggle to witness the shifts in focus across EA to go towards X risks like AI. My friends can't relate to it; they feel like it's a depressing way to view this movement and dedicate their careers. So much so that we often stop identifying with the community/movement depending on how it's framed and contextualized. (If I were in a social setting where one person [Anne] who knows about EA was explaining it to someone [Kyle] who had never heard of it and that person [Kyle] then asked me if I am "an EA", then I might vary my response, depending on the presentation that the first person [Anne] provided. If the provided explanation was really heavy handed with an X-risk/AI focus, I'd probably have a hard time explaining that I work for an EA org that is actually completely unrelated... Or I might just say something like "I love the people and the ideas" haha)

I'm extra passionate about this because I have been preparing a forum post called either "flavors of EA" or "branches of EA" that would propose this same set of ideas! But you've done such a great job painting a picture of the root issues. I really hope this post and its ideas gain traction. (I'm not gonna stop talking about it until it does haha) Thanks ParthThaya

But I sometimes have a fear in the back of my mind that some of the attendees who are intrigued by these ideas are later going to look up effective altruism, get the impression that the movement’s focus is just about existential risks these days, and feel duped.  Since EA pitches don’t usually start with longtermist ideas, it can feel like a bait and switch.

To avoid the feeling of a bait and switch, I think one solution is to introduce existential risk in the initial pitch. For example, when introducing my student group Effective Altruism at Georgia Tech, I tend to say something like: "Effective Altruism at Georgia Tech is a student group which aims to empower students to pursue careers tackling the world's most pressing problems, such as global poverty, animal welfare, or existential risk from climate change, future pandemics, or advanced AI." It's totally fine to mention existential risk – students still seem pretty interested and happy to sign up for our mailing list.