Why I prefer "Effective Altruism" to "Global Priorities"

I think you make good points - basically all of these points came up in my mind when I read Jonas's post and the comments there, so I'm glad you've already written them up nice and clearly!

That said, I think it's also worth highlighting the following comment Jonas made on his post:

The current discussion in the comments seems quite centered on "effective altruism vs. global priorities". I just wanted to highlight that I spent, like, 3 minutes in total thinking about alternative naming options, and feel pretty confident that there are probably quite a few options that work better than "global priorities". In fact, when renaming CLR, we only came up with the new name after brainstorming many options. So I would really like us to generate a list of >10 great alternatives (i.e. actually viable alternatives) before starting to compare them.

(See also my reply there.)

I don't know how much of an outlier I am, but I feel like "change the name of the movement" is mostly not an option on the table. Rather there's a question about how much (or when) to emphasise different labels, with the understanding that the different labels will necessarily refer to somewhat different things. (This is a different situation than an organisation considering a rebrand; in the movement case people who preferred the connotations of the older label are liable to just keep using it.)

Anyhow, I like your defence of "effective altruism", and I don't think it should be abandoned (while still thinking that there are some contexts where it gets used but something else might be better).

I am enjoying all this recent discussion on what we should be calling "effective altruism". 

As EA ideas become more common and get applied in a larger variety of contexts, it might be good to have different words that are context and audience specific.  For example, "global priorities" seems like a great name for the academic field, and it can be acknowledged that it is related to "effective altruism" the social movement which is, itself, clearly very distinct but still related to the LessWrong/Rationality community. Maybe policy orientated effective altruism needs its own name (clearly related to the academic field and social movement but distinct from it?). Similarly, maybe it is also okay for a broader appeal version of effective altruism to have a different name (this is maybe what the GWWC brand is moving towards?). 

The effective altruism project is pretty broad and even if a large amount more thought had been put into the name, it still seems unlikely to me that one name could appeal to policy-makers, academics, the broader population and students/ people on the internet that both like to deeply philosophise about morality and base their lives around the conclusions of that philosophising. 

I have some data that may be relevant to folks with interest in this topic*:
I work for CEA, and this quarter I did a small brand test with Rethink’s help. We asked a sample of US college students if they had heard of “effective altruism.” Some respondents were also asked to give a brief definition of EA and a Likert scale rating of how negative/positive their first impression was of “effective altruism.”

Students who had never heard of “effective altruism” before the survey still had positive associations with it. Comments suggested that they thought it sounded good  - effectiveness means doing things well; altruism means kindness and helping people. (IIRC, the average Likert scale score was 4+ out of 5). There were a small number of critiques too, but fewer than we expected. (Sorry that this is just a high-level summary - we don't have a full writeup ready yet.)

Caveats: We didn't test the name “effective altruism” against other possible names. Impressions will probably vary by audience. It could still be the case that "EA" puts off a sub-set of the audience we really want to reach. (E.g. if we found that highly critical/truth-seeking people in certain fields were often turned away by "EA," I'd consider that a concern. We don't have that data). 

I do think this is encouraging, but doesn't settle the question.  Testing other brands and sub-brands may still be a good idea. Testing brands within very specific sub-audiences is also harder to do. CEA is currently considering trying to hire someone to test and develop the EA brand, and help field media inquiries.

*I think this post may have been written after I gave Max the info that he posted  on my behalf here so I'm cross-posting. 
 

As noted in my other comment, I think you make great points, though I also think that we should probably not spend too much energy specifically pitting "effective altruism" against "global priorities" before we've thought about more names and what our goals are. 

Those things being said, here are three additional points I'd make in favour of "effective altruism" over "global priorities", which I think are related but somewhat distinct from what you've said:

• Another specific reason why a "global approach" or "global priorities" aren't necessarily what all EAs should focus on (even within their "altruistic budgets" of time, money, etc.) is comparative advantage. To elaborate: There are some cases in which something like "charity starts at home" makes sense, because there are cases in which "local issues" are easier for a person to learn about, form connections relevant to, gain influence over, and/or get motivated about.
  • I mainly have in mind "local" at a national or regional level, rather than e.g. individual cities.
  • E.g., I think people from the EU who want to influence AI policy are often/usually better off influencing EU AI policy rather than US AI policy. And this is despite the fact that I think US AI policy is in general substantially more important to influence on the margin.
  • Open Phil make a similar argument for making US policy a major focus area (though I'm not sure I fully endorse all their priorities there, personally).
  • This still requires prioritisation (e.g., don't just jump to working on improving education in one's city because that's what one has already heard about), but pushes against just picking global priorities, or even things that are global priorities on the margin (so account for neglectedness) in general.
• I think "using evidence and reason to do the most good possible" really is a great slogan-length encapsulation of the aims of EA, from my perspective. Relatedly, I think the "combining the head and the heart" framing seems appropriate to me (and also compelling to me personally, though that data point seems less relevant). And "effective altruism" lines up neatly with each of those two-part framings.
  • I think this aligns closely with a bunch of things you already said. To some extent, this may just be a different way of framing some points you made.
• I think "global priorities" doesn't strongly imply actually taking any actions (whether large-scale or individual). It sounds more naturally like it focuses on research. 
  • EA is already often perceived as too research-focused, so it might be good to avoid things that would exacerbate that.

Thank you for this post. This is a really fascinating discussion. I'm not entirely sure which "side" I end up on (or, of course, maybe there's another name that would be better than both that hasn't been proposed). At first I wasn't sure, but I might agree that GP sounds more arrogant than EA. Or at least they're both pretty close. 

Honestly, this whole debate—and similar recent ones— has made me very confused about what EA is at the moment. I look back to the pitch that I gave my college roommate about doing more good by being thoughtful and deliberative about charities and I wonder how much longer that will be (should be, can be) the EA (GP?) pitch. I wonder how I would've reacted to a GP pitch about researching and engaging in ostensible global priorities over the "you can help a lot of people and isn't that good" pitch.

I think EA sometimes tries to have it all. Like, it wants to be everything and to be compatible with all (or most) worldviews. But it seems to me that if you want to be an "international social movement" then you probably can't be Global Priorities, because that (I would argue) is pretty arrogant and exclusive. However, if you want to have more of a research/prioritization focus and less on things like individual donors, well, then Effective Altruism might not cut it either.

So, what is EA? Is it about donating? Going vegan? Getting an impactful job? Doing high-level research into cause X? Is it movement focused or is it research focused? 

My intuition is that you can't be all of this. Or, at the very least, we don't have the bandwidth for all of this. 

I'm very confused about this, does anyone have a way to resolve this at least a little?