I agree that EA shouldn't be defined by any particular conclusions about how to do the most good. But in addition to the question, there is also a methodology that goes along with it:

• Impartiality or cosmopolitanism - that is to say, that everyone is (close to) equally important, and non-humans deserve some weight as well
• A willingness to consider and compare all options in a open-minded way
• Epistemic humility - we shouldn't assume our conclusions are better than others, and so it is important to...
• Use evidence and reason in an attempt to be persuasive to others.

Then we should also be willing to act on the above rather than ignore it. These certainly aren't new ideas, but rather the application of approaches from the enlightenment, natural sciences and social science (at least when done well) to altruistic endeavours.

I agree that 'effective altruist' is an awkward term that is unintentionally self-aggrandising, but I use it for lack of a better alternative. 'Aspiring effective altruists', or 'members of the effective altruist community', might be better.

Key points

• We (the effective altruism community) probably want a community centred around values/principles/axioms rather than conclusions.
• This post is a great starting point to value-centric discussions instead of conclusion-centric.
  • It communicates that asking the question honestly and then acting on its answer is more important than the specific current conclusions
  • It is very accessible so newcomers can easily understand it (having this be articulated for people new to effective altruism helps make this a central part of the effective altruism movement in the future because some newcomers will make up our future community)
     

Elaboration on key points 

I think this post nudges the culture of the effective altruism movement in a really good direction. I don’t think it necessarily accurately describes what the effective altruism movement is, but more of what it aspires to be. Having this compass on where we want to be helps us nudge the movement towards that.

Why do we want to emphasise values/principles/axioms over conclusions?

The answer to the question “how do we do as much good as possible with our limited resources” (referred to as the EA question for the rest of this review) is an uncertain one: we never have complete information. The answer to the EA question is also a dynamic one: our judgement of the best answer, even if we did have all the information, is likely to be constantly changing with time, as our world changes. 

Reasonable conclusions tend to be context-dependent and should change rapidly as we learn new information and our world changes.  Principles/values/axioms can and should remain much more stable over time (though they likely should gain nuance with time too, hopefully, as we've thought more). 

How this post (and posts like it) help

We can’t help but be at least a little bit defined by our current conclusions, but posts like this remind us that we aspire to be about the question, not any specific current answer. 

This post's usefulness for communicating to newcomers what effective altruism is aspiring to be about is helped by it being an exceptionally accessible piece of writing. Someone new to effective altruism can read it without reading much other material and still understand it. This makes it particularly useful because it helps newcomers see effective altruism more like how we want effective altruism to be. This helps us bring in more people interested in effective altruism’s question more than effective altruism’s current conclusions. It also helps new people see effective altruism as more about its question than its current conclusions.

This post certainly helped me to feel like I belonged in the effective altruism community soon after I first came across the movement, while I was still forming my best guesses on the answer to the question "how do I do the most good?". It helped me feel like I belonged in the community while my guesses were often very different from those I knew in the community. Why? It brought the emphasis back to values that I completely was on board rather than conclusions I wasn't fully convinced by or didn't fully understand. For me, posts like this one did not act in a vacuum. Reading this was probably only convincing because I  also had great conversations with people in the community that emphasised these points. 

 If we can make people who are curious about the question “how do we do as much good with our lives” feel more welcome in our community, then we'll attract more curious, more independent thinkers. In the long run, this will probably create a healthier effective altruism movement (even if there are some costs from a loss in cohesiveness from not all having the same conclusions).  

Material like this, along with people in the community demonstrating these ideas in real-time in conversations and their actions, can go a long way to create a movement united by principles instead of one united by (hopefully) transient conclusions. 

Some follow-up thoughts

 Should we be united around ideas like “AI safety is one of the most important issues of our time” or ideas like “all people (and perhaps more than just people) are worthy of moral consideration”? I suspect we want to have a stronger identity around ideas like the latter than the former. 

Given the answer to the EA question is uncertain and dynamically changing, I suspect that we want to be more united by fundamental principles (values/ axioms) like “all people (or all sentient beings) are worthy of moral consideration” rather than conclusions like “AI safety is one of the most important issues of our time”.*

Diversity in conclusions is desirable, as long as we all have clear common ground (that is narrow enough that having a community is still useful). What should that clear and sufficiently narrow common ground be? This is a challenging question, but my guess is that we want to find more principle/value-centric common ground.  Posts like this help us map that out right from our first introduction and can help remind us of what we want effective altruism to be many years later. 

Note: lots has been written more recently that is related, but because I am short on time and reviews need to be posted by tomorrow, I am posting this review now (but I might come back and add some links I think are particularly relevant).

*This is a fuzzy distinction, “future lives are worthy of moral consideration” might reasonably be classed as a conclusion or a principle. However, I still think it is a meaningful one, despite the existence of edge cases.
 

I like this way of thinking about EA because I see it more like a process than an ideology. When I'm trying to explain to friends and acquaintances, I tend to say "I am interested in effective altruism," and talk about what trying to make decisions based on evidence and reason and expected positive impact could look like. 

I agree with this, and try (sometimes awkwardly) not to put the phrase "effective altruist" in materials whose intended audience is the general public, much as I do with the acronyms GWWC and 80k.

My worry though is that people will use "effective altruists" as a phrase to describe people in our movement unless we give them a better one to use. Other than "aspiring effective altruist", which I have used occasionally when talking with journalists, I don't find any of the others 'sticky' enough.

I would love to hear suggestions from others on a short memorable phrase that we can use to describe ourselves collectively and as individuals, because I worry that otherwise "effective altruists" will end up being used.

I see two claims in the post: 1) EA is asking a question not answering it and 2) the practical benefits of thinking of EA as asking a question outweigh the costs. I'm uncertain about the first claim and I disagree with the second.

For the first claim, it seems to me that EA is answering a question. The question is "what should I do with my life" and the answer is "do the most good with the resources available to me." This at least seems equally as reasonable as the interpretation you suggest. Perhaps there's some method of determining which interpretation is better, but I don't know what that method might be.

For the second claim, I think there are very significant practical downside to thinking of EA as a question and avoiding calling ourselves "effective altruists." It seems to me that, Paul Graham's arguments aside, people like creating identities. We build identities around all kinds of things and are motivated to act based on the identities we create. So, if increasing the number of people with the EA meme is beneficial (and I think it is) and if building an identity around it is useful for spreading the meme, then it seems like there are huge practical benefits to representing EA as an identity.

This article affected me a lot when I first read it (in 2015 or so), and is/was a nontrivial part of what I considered "effective altruism" to mean. Skimming it again, I think it might be a little oversimplified, and has a bit of a rhetorical move that I don't love of conflating "what the world is like' vs "what I want the world to be like."

Still, I think this article was strong at the time, and I think it is still strong now. 

I am quite puzzled by the first paragraph of this post, because even after reading the rest of it, I still find them perfectly meaningful. It appears to me that the post not only fails to defend the idea that the three questions don't make sense, but it actually answers them, just as follows:

"What is the definition of Effective Altruism?": The action or habit of asking oneself the question of how to do the most good with the available resources, using a particular methodology (as per the author's comment on Robert_Wilbin's reply below). "What claims does it make?" : None, as per the definition above. "What do you have to believe or do, to be an Effective Altruist?": Asking yourself the question above and trying to answer it using the given methodology. I have my doubts on the answer to the first question. The term EA often seems to be denoting a social movement or a philosophy, rather than a habit.

But more importantly, when the author and some other people in the comments talk about the "definition" of EA, they appear to refer to something akin to a definition in a mathematical theory: a succint but correct and complete statement describing EA that can later be used to draw conclusions in arguments about EA. However (if you have read mathematics textbooks, you may be familiar with this) such definitions are often insufficient in order to get a clear and complete idea of what something is.

In other words, if somebody asks in good faith what EA is, a much more illuminating reply would not only frame EA as a social movement, rather than a personal habit, but it would note that the general tendency in this movement is to understand the idea of 'a better world' in line with some brand of consequentialism, and it would also describe the kind of "actions" that are typically considered by EAs, such as donating to charities, choosing a career, etc. This can still be done succintly, and yet a much more accurate picture of EA is transmitted.

My point is: it can be misleading to think of EA as being asking a question; instead, one has a more accurate picture if they think of it as a movement, based on a key question and methodology, but also with its correspoding history and particularities. The post, however, does a good job in reminding any aspiring effective altruist that there is a possibility that particular conclusions about how to do the most good which have been determined by the EA community could, in principle, be wrong, and that the only certain invariant of EA is the question (and methodology) of how to do the most good with the available resources.

But I am an Effective Altruist, Helen -- 😓 By definition, as a member of the Effective Altruism community, no matter what I do or what I ask. Of course, engaging with the movement, I am more likely to expand my moral circles, gain knowledge and motivation to do great, et cetera, just like the other Effective Altruists. Held accountable by the institution itself, I enter, remain, or exit freely.

I disagree with a bit of the intro and part one.

You can easily say that Effective Altruism answers a question. The question is, "What should I do with my life?" and the answer is, "As much good as possible (or at least a decent step in that direction)." Only if you take that answer as a starting premise can you then say that EA asks the question, "How do I do the most good?"

Conversely, you can just as easily say that feminism doesn't ask whether men and women should be equal (that they should be is the starting premise), it asks how society is structurally unequal and how we might re-make society so that it becomes equal.

So I don't see EA as necessarily in some different category than the (other) ideologies that you list.

In part one, I just... don't really see a big issue with -ism versus -ist, at least not one any near as large as you're claiming exists. “Can I [x] and still be a member of the Effective Altruism movement?” seems about as natural a question to ask as “Can I [x] and still be an Effective Altruist?” As long as there's an EA movement that's in any way demanding of its followers, it provokes the same sort of questions regardless of whether we call ourselves followers of Effective Altruism or Effective Altruists. Insofar as there's a problem, I think it's the "impudence" that you mention of calling this movement Effective Altruism in the first place.

(If someone comes up with a better term for EA followers, I'll be happy to adopt it -- I don't see it as a big issue. In the meantime I'll occasionally call myself an "EA" if it makes sense to do so in context.)

Alternative descriptors include “aspiring effective altruist”, “interested in Effective Altruism”, “member of the Effective Altruism movement”… What do you think of those options?

"Aspiring effective altruist" doesn't describe me: I don't aspire to anything more than what I'm currently doing, which is donating a decent-sized fraction of my salary to charity. I plateaued in my journey towards an idealised EA several years ago.

"Interested in Effective Altruism" is far too weak.

"Member of the Effective Altruism movement" is something I'd happy to call myself.

Does anyone like "skeptical altruist"?

Regarding concerns about the name "effective altruist": I think it's good that the term "EA" is coming into coming use, at least in this community. Someday it may be so ingrained that thinking about the etymology will require conscious effort. As Steven Pinker points out, this is a common process in language. "Breakfast" means to "break fast", but most people don't think about this consciously.

We should try to avoid calling ourselves “effective altruists”

I just realized a big factor into why we have been calling ourselves "effective altruists" is because the public Facebook group, with thousands of members who all join the group openly, and voluntarily, is called "Effective Altruists". The Facebook group is maybe the most public landing pad for individuals new to effective altruism. Additionally, the term 'effective altruist' seems likely to have been generalized to other public-facing events, such as the Effective Altruism Summit. How important is it that this change, considering we might need to muster great effort to do it.

• This post is serendipitous because I myself was thinking of writing a post sometime about how effective altruism is more a method than it is a philosophy. That is, effective altruism is philosophy in action, but it doesn't need to be a philosophy, i.e., complete way of life. i.e., ideology. I still want to write that article in the future because framing effective altruism as a method taking its first steps into discovering what tends to work well in doing good, and what tends to work not as well.

• How you framed it in the article is that ideologies answer questions, while effective altruism asks questions. Is another way of saying this the distinction between asking descriptive vs. normative questions, or making descriptive vs. normative claims? I don't think so, but I'm unsure. Either way, I don't believe it makes sense to make effective altruism into something that doesn't ask normative claims, or doesn't ask normative questions. Effective altruism is a community of people as much as it is anything else, so it's not something that exists on its own (yet) as being indifferent to how 'good' is defined, so long as much as possible of it is done.

• In the interest of reducing the size of identities for not just myself, but for others, and bunches of individuals, I've taken to referring to 'effective altruism' as if it's a single agent sometimes. This may seem strange, but we do it all the time. In the news, 'The White House' wants all sorts of things; this is to the point that sometimes not only are the decisions of the executive branch conflated with the opinions of the whole federal government, but the position of America as a whole. Of course, that's a problem on the other side that effective altruism doesn't need worry about right now (see what I did there?). Sometimes I'll also use 'the effective altruist community', similar to the 'scientific community'. For example, the effective altruist community has mixed feelings on the efficacy of yet untested charitable interventions.

• Again, I was thinking along similar lines with the idea of our actions and suggestions being features of effective altruism as it exists in the present, not the source of what effective altruism means at its core. Even more than people identifying themselves with 'effective altruism', I'm worried that identifying effective altruism with distinct causes permanently may limit the potential of what effective altruism can become, and also dilute it to the point that it doesn't feel different than any other advocacy movement.

I think the AE should be considered a philosophy, whose supporters disseminate and put into practice, individually, when, how and if they want to. I also think that it started not long ago and that 'speaks' more to the mind than to the heart, becoming, therefore, unattractive. Somehow, the AE, with an elitist trend, just selecting who should participate in it, which unfortunately excludes the largest share of the world population, as 'lady' of much practice charity in their own way and without rational appeal any, still sees undervalued given the demands it places Singer. I have found the Effective Altruism, page also visit, very fertile in ideas but sterile on projects or specific actions. What might be great to be discussed, including the mentor, it is that it should be promoted and developed differently from country to country according to local needs.