Kind of expanding on my questions and thoughts about EA's age gap, I have been wondering: What exactly is the endgame of Effective Altruism? Forum members, I would love to hear your thoughts.
There are some Forum pieces thinking in this direction for specific EA cause areas, such as AI Safety or Animal Welfare. But none of them (that I can find) seem to focus on the individual level, the community membership one.
Apologies in advance for the possibly poorly formulated question. Yet, this literal question came up while discussing how I should consider EA and/or moral ambition in my life, a conversation I had with an EA-aligned career guidance advisor: "Does one graduate from EA? From the philosophy, from the community?", we both pondered. And beyond that:
- If yes, how? What does that look like? Are there any prototypes, examples, trajectories one can could name with regards to this?
- If no, what does that mean? Is there a point at which one can be "played out"? At what stage has a life reached its maximum possible impact made?
Not everyone gets to be so lucky as to actually make a significant positive impact through working on the most urgent problems our world is facing with an especially impactful organisation, let alone achieve setting up such an organisation oneself. Volunteering is great, but bills will need to be paid at some point. Health, home situation, all sorts of things need to be taken into account. Effective giving while working a possibly rather un-impactful job may still be a much more accessible, attainable way of putting EA principles into practice, for most mere mortals anyway.
** Edit: maybe this should be a quick take instead?
I don't think that EA should be graduated from. I think that it's a matter of continuing to develop in both the "effective" and "altruistic" components.
With "Effective", I'd say we're talking about an epistemological process. There, you're trying to learn the relevant knowledge about the world and yourself such that the resources within your control that you are deciding to deploy for altruistic purposes are deployed such that they can do the most good.
With "Altruism", that would be digging deep within yourself so that you can deploy more of those resources. The ideal, in my mind, would be having no more partiality to your own interests than those of other conscious beings across space, species, and/or time.
So, I don't see an endpoint, but rather a constant striving for knowledge, wisdom, and will.