I’m troubled by two posts I’ve seen lately distinguishing between “hardcore” and “softcore” effective altruists. Even if we introduce these terms with the goal of reducing stigma, “softcore” is always going to sound a bit insulting. (Not to mention that it’s typically used to describe porn, not people.)
Do other types of movements make this distinction? Political parties include a wide spectrum of people from those who simply vote, to those who campaign for particular causes or candidates, to those who hold office and spend their entire careers to their party. “Environmentalists” include everyone from those who try to conserve energy in their daily lives to those choosing radically different lifestyles and working for major policy changes. Some religious traditions distinguish between “laypeople” and those who have taken vows, but this term doesn’t have the same dismissive connotation as “softcore” (perhaps because it’s understood that clergy and monastics could not exist without the support of the laity).
Of course, there will be variation in how involved people get with any movement. Some people will keep their engagement with effective altruism at a fairly casual level—perhaps telling friends and family about an excellent charity. Others will become deeply involved, committing much more of their time and money. People will shift between levels as their beliefs and life circumstances change, perhaps as they become more committed or develop health problems. And it’s hard to tell from the outside how difficult a particular level is for any given person; an amount of effort or money that's easy for one person will be a major stretch for another.
Having strictly defined categories of involvement doesn’t seem likely to help. Even among people who have taken some concrete step like taking the Giving What We Can pledge or organizing an EA meetup, there will be a lot of variation in effort and impact. So perhaps it makes sense to see involvement with effective altruism as a continuum rather than a two-category division.
One of the things I love about effective altruism is that it demonstrates how small changes—whether moving your donations to better charities, learning about a career you didn’t know much about, or giving away enough to put you in the world’s richest 2% instead of the richest 1%—can lead to big impacts. I would hate to see these kinds of changes minimized as “soft.”
Thanks to Michelle Hutchinson, Oliver Habryka, and Tyler Alterman for feedback; all opinions expressed are my own.
+1 for 'Dedicated EAs' and 'EAs'. I think 80k internally could describe all it wants to describe in simple English using those terms. It's naturally a continuum. If you really really need to describe people who are into EA but not that dedicated then 'less dedicated' is fine. "Committed" could work too. (I understand 'dedicated' to mean: how highly someone scores on the product of 'into effectiveness' and 'into altruism'.)
-1 for 'full-time' and 'part-time', I don't think it conveys what we mean (at least, doesn't to me; I'd be confused when I first heard it) and I'd personally find it annoying to be described as 'part-time'.
+10000 for ditching 'hardcore' and 'softcore'
First off, a comment I left on Facebook on this:
"I would also strongly advocate for describing the "softcore" EAs as simply 'EAs' or 'effective altuists' and then inventing a new term for the more 'hardcore' among us (how many of us are there anyway? Can't we all just agree to use a code word when talking to each other and otherwise not worry about this issue?). Fears of being judged or looked down on because they aren't 'hardcore' enough in some form or other are still the most common reasons I hear for people who basically agree with EA staying at a distance from the movement. I wish I could more easily to communicate to those people just how terrible a job most EAs do of living up to their ideals."
So yeah, I don't like the word 'softcore'. In fact, because I expect 80%+ of EAs and rising to be 'softcore' for the foreseeable future I don't see the point in having a word for them at all. They're the baseline and don't need a special descriptor.
It would be useful to have a descriptor for those who make EA large part of their 'life's work' in some way. I actually don't mind 'hardcore' here. Hardcore is already used in this context in many other movements (hardcor... (read more)
Practical arguments:
I once spent 30 minutes debating EA recruitment techniques with someone and we spent the entire time talking past each other. Two days later these terms came out and we realized he was talking softcore and I was talking hardcore. Having those terms available would have made it a much more productive discussion because the techniques and best targets are completely different.
The advice is different. 80k hours' advice for EA global participants is almost opposite its public advice (e.g. flipping the emphasis on direct work vs. donating). I advise people on the street to give to AMF, my statistician father to donate to GiveWell, "softcore" EAs to OPP, and "hardcore" to donate to metacharities, unproven new ideas, or to nudge charities to be more effective.
At a certain point of income and what someone's time produces for the world, donating to even the most effective charity is net negative to the world, because freeing up their time or brain has more impact. Having a socially acceptable way to mark that and reverse the pressure to donate seems really useful.
These aren't 100% correlated- by definition the people who shouldn't donate shouldn't donate to metacharities. And we need better words. But I think the concept is useful enough to keep.
In thinking about terminology, it might be useful to distinguish (i) magnitude of impact and (ii) value alignment. There are a lot of wealthy individuals who've had an enormous impact (and should be applauded for it), but who correctly are not described as "EA." And there are individuals who are extremely value aligned with the imaginary prototypical EA (or range of prototypical EAs) but whose impact might be quite small, through no fault of their own. Incidentally, I think those in the latter category are better community leaders than those in the former.
Edit: I'm not suggesting that either group should be termed anything; just that the current terminology seems to elide these groups.
Yes, very much agreed about the continuum, I made the same point in my earlier post on this topic.
There is a quite strong distinction drawn between simple voters, to donors, ... (read more)
The only way to get people to stop using these terms is if we have an alternative way of indicating how much someone is likely to sacrifice in the pursuit of helping others.
It seems like we really don't know whether a more hierarchical structure is good for EA or not. Some types of organizations/institutions have hierarchies (most religions, governments, companies), and some (like more social movements, communities, friend groups) don't, or have extremely informal and loose ones.
At best, the hierarchies provide valuable information about merit and dedication level, facilitate coordination, and incentivize high-quality work. At worst, they fuck everything up completely.
I don't think we have good information about what structu... (read more)
Thanks for this post Julia.
I know lots of people have been seeking alternatives to the 'hardcore vs softcore' terms that seem to have sprung up, and I agree that alternative terms are preferable to those two for many reasons. However I think you've addressed a much more important issue, that any binary categorisation is artificial and likely to be counterproductive.
Hi Julia - I wholeheartedly agree with your semantic point: the words "hardcore" and "softcore" seem potentially harmful.
However, I wonder if the stronger thesis is true: "Having strictly defined categories of involvement doesn’t seem likely to help."
It seems plausible, but I can think of worlds in which categories of involvement actually do play an important role. (For instance, there is a reason galas will do things like sort donors into silver, gold, and platinum levels based on their level of contribution.) Since one coul... (read more)
I'm interested to see people phrasing their arguments in terms of distinguishing how much sacrifice people make.
Personally, I'm sympathetic to distinguishing between how much impact people have, but thinking too hard about who sacrifices the most (except inasmuch as it's correlated with the former) seems like it's against the spirit of EA. It's about how much good you do, not how much you give up to do it!
If you're living on $10k and donating $90k, then donating your marginal $10k is WAY more of a sacrifice than if you're living on $90k and donating $10k. ... (read more)
I think there are some reasons to care about how much sacrifice people make (and related things, like effort, motivation etc.) independent of impact. One obvious one: you can ask and expect people different things of people who are making or are willing to make huge sacrifices compared to those who will only sacrifice a bit. Drawing the distinction is necessary to do a lot of practical tasks. It's also very important to what kind of movement EA is as a whole: if we are 90% diehard EAs who will donate their last penny to effective charity that's a very different movement to if we are 90% people who don't much care for sacrifice.
It seems we also want to recognise the efforts of people who sacrifice a lot but don't produce so much impact. Even if we try to avoid it we're inevitably always shuffling around symbolic status and recognition. We want to respect 'the widow's mite' - rather than assign recognition purely based on what actually gets done, given that being able to do a lot depends on the privilege of being able to get a lot done.
Yes, these terms (or their cognates) are routinely applied to all these examples, and more, because the concepts are indispensable. The clergy/leity distinction is orthogonal to this: we certainly distinguish between the most devout, diehard, extreme, hardcore Christians and the soft, liberal, nominal, softcore vaguely Christian.
I've not seen any strictly defi... (read more)
I'm against segregating EAs, and if we ever have separate water fountains or bus seats for different classes of EA, I will protest. (EDIT: Looking back on this, I was using something of a strawman here. I apologise. My intent was to distinguish between segregation and categorisation.)
Categorisation, however, is something that we inevitably do and which is sometimes useful to do.
If categorisation makes people feel minimised or relegated to second class status, it's a problem. In line with some other comments here, I'm in favour of a term such as hardcore o... (read more)
Retracted for gratuitous snarkiness.
Ironically, the term "Effective Altruist" was originally invented as a replacement for "super-duper hardcore people", so this seems to be something of an example of linguistic drift. It was never originally intended to be a public-facing term.
Whatever phrase we choose, clearly we are referring to something real when we speak of EAs who are "hardcore" or "softcore". Just because some people are in the middle doesn't mean that there is no use to be had in drawing a distinction. Clearly we have an issue that we need to talk about, and we can start chucking words out of our lexicon, but if we are chucking words out of our lexicon merely because they refer to concepts that make us uncomfortable, then either (a) we are going to replace them with new words that still make us uncomf... (read more)
I very much agree...