Recent comments by Holden Karnofsky, the leader of Open Philanthropy (and influential enough to initiate a name-change for EA):
Having seen the EA brand under the spotlight, I now think it isn’t a great brand for wide public outreach. It throws together a lot of very different things (global health giving, global catastrophic risk reduction, longtermism) in a way that makes sense to me but seems highly confusing to many, and puts them all under a wrapper that seems self-righteous and, for lack of a better term, punchable? I still think of myself as an effective altruist and think we should continue to have an EA brand for attracting the sort of people (like myself) who want to put a lot of dedicated, intensive time into thinking about what issues they can work on to do the most good; but I’m not sure this is the brand that will or should attract most of the people who can be helpful on key causes. I think it’s probably good to focus more on building communities and professional networks around specific causes (e.g., AI risk, biorisk, animal welfare, global health) relative to building them around “EA.”
It would still be better if there was a parent organization based on mutual respect/pragmatism; EA is currently still the final frontier for every vegan everywhere, for example, including those in professional networks such as government policy.
It seems to me like if someone thinks of a good enough name for EA, that people at least accept as a parent organization and an umbrella of mutual respect/pragmatism/sanity, then that will substantially increase the odds that it gets adopted.
“Quantifiable Altruism”, for example, seems like it would attract lots of math people and altruistic people, rather than people really into moral philosophy.
That seems great; I’m not sure if EA is currently bottlenecked on quant folk, but if there were tons of quant folk, it would at least make for a substantially larger talent pool for AI alignment upskilling programs to draw from. For ~1.5 years now, I’ve been working on a personal project that has been heavily bottlenecked by the fact that I don’t know anyone I can trust who is really good at math. I’m currently skeptical of the idea that any group of people can have too many math nerds, to the point where they can’t utilize most of them for important projects.
There’s also other factors at play; EA is the ultimate destination for virtually all vegans in the world right now (hypothetically, a vegan could theoretically become dictator of the world and stomp out the meat industry a few years before a viable meat substitute is invented, so I can’t say that it’s the end 100% of vegans). A name like Quantified Altruism would be a good name for that too, as basically any vegan could look at their beloved pet and think “wow, that’s only +1 animal, I ought to think about numbers” after hearing the words “Quantified Altruism”. I suppose you could worry about getting the best possible ratio of geniuses to emotionally unstable people, but it’s also the case that competent people want to know precisely what you’re talking about when you refer to something for the first time; “Effective Altruism” has some serious problems with this, as Yudkowsky made clear.
[Question] What could EA’s new name be?
[Disclaimer: this was not an April fools joke, people are actually working on this right now and this is the only critical window to contribute]
Recent comments by Holden Karnofsky, the leader of Open Philanthropy (and influential enough to initiate a name-change for EA):
It would still be better if there was a parent organization based on mutual respect/pragmatism; EA is currently still the final frontier for every vegan everywhere, for example, including those in professional networks such as government policy.
It seems to me like if someone thinks of a good enough name for EA, that people at least accept as a parent organization and an umbrella of mutual respect/pragmatism/sanity, then that will substantially increase the odds that it gets adopted.
Yudkowsky proposed a decent name and gave a decent justification for it, but it’s probably worthwhile to have some people put 5 minutes into a name that could work (and spending 5 minutes thinking has a significant chance of yielding a galaxy-brained solution)
“Quantifiable Altruism”, for example, seems like it would attract lots of math people and altruistic people, rather than people really into moral philosophy.
That seems great; I’m not sure if EA is currently bottlenecked on quant folk, but if there were tons of quant folk, it would at least make for a substantially larger talent pool for AI alignment upskilling programs to draw from. For ~1.5 years now, I’ve been working on a personal project that has been heavily bottlenecked by the fact that I don’t know anyone I can trust who is really good at math. I’m currently skeptical of the idea that any group of people can have too many math nerds, to the point where they can’t utilize most of them for important projects.
There’s also other factors at play; EA is the ultimate destination for virtually all vegans in the world right now (hypothetically, a vegan could theoretically become dictator of the world and stomp out the meat industry a few years before a viable meat substitute is invented, so I can’t say that it’s the end 100% of vegans). A name like Quantified Altruism would be a good name for that too, as basically any vegan could look at their beloved pet and think “wow, that’s only +1 animal, I ought to think about numbers” after hearing the words “Quantified Altruism”. I suppose you could worry about getting the best possible ratio of geniuses to emotionally unstable people, but it’s also the case that competent people want to know precisely what you’re talking about when you refer to something for the first time; “Effective Altruism” has some serious problems with this, as Yudkowsky made clear.
It’s also important to keep in mind that the ingroup-outgroup mentality is probably the human brain’s most exploited zero-day, in all of human history. Since EA will inevitably become an ingroup for some people and an outgroup for others, this fact is highly relevant.
What could EA change it’s name to?