Cross-posted from my Substack.
Epistemic status: I’ve puzzled over this for a long time but I’m not sure I came to the right answers. I'm sharing this partly because it might help others work on resource allocation, but mostly because some smarter reader might tell me how to do it better.
TL;DR:
* I he...
With the AI windfall, mental health may be taken increasingly seriously by mainstream EA. There’s increasingly room to explore the cause area and answer some of the biggest uncertainties; at the same time, costs of the most effective interventions are continuing to fall. StrongMinds is now treating for ~$35, about a third of GiveWell’s best guess from a few years ago, and is expected to...
It seems to me that much of the evaluations/criticisms/defenses of EA conflate the empirical phenomena (whatever you see on with the EA forum, whatever is happening at your local university group, CEA, EAGs, or whatever) with some broader idea of effective altruism (the philosophy stuff / possibly the normative stuff if you believe in that). I am uncertain how to define this “broader idea”, maybe I can call it some theoretical core, maybe I can call it Weber’s idealized type (a deliberately purified theoretical construct that no empirical instance fully matches), maybe I can say something about Wittgenstein and family resemblance (his refute to the demand that a concept must have a common essence), maybe we can each reference our own favorite theoretical definition of EA for the purpose of this point)
But I think never the less it is pretty important to distinguish the empirical manifestation of EA (the type of stuff you can do sociology on), and the theoretical core (to the extent that we can define some semi-coherent notion of such).
We used to call this upper case (ea community/movement) vs lower case (the (meta) philosophy). I think meta normative framework/philsophy is the way I think about it; that is, you can apply EA to most normative frameworks, esp consequentalisty ones (though to many people in the community, the EA framework is actually just applied total utilitarianism). FWIW, and I say this as someone who has many issues with the EA community, the vast majority of EA criticisms from outside the community I see are just highly inaccurate and not worth engaging with from an intellectual POV (but maybe still worth engaging with for movement reputation).