Kind of expanding on my questions and thoughts about EA's age gap, I have been wondering: What exactly is the endgame of Effective Altruism? Forum members, I would love to hear your thoughts.
There are some Forum pieces thinking in this direction for specific EA cause areas, such as AI Safety or Animal Welfare. But none of them (that I can find) seem to focus on the individual level, the community membership one.
Apologies in advance for the possibly poorly formulated question. Yet, this literal question came up while discussing how I should consider EA and/or moral ambition in my life, a conversation I had with an EA-aligned career guidance advisor: "Does one graduate from EA? From the philosophy, from the community?", we both pondered. And beyond that:
- If yes, how? What does that look like? Are there any prototypes, examples, trajectories one can could name with regards to this?
- If no, what does that mean? Is there a point at which one can be "played out"? At what stage has a life reached its maximum possible impact made?
Not everyone gets to be so lucky as to actually make a significant positive impact through working on the most urgent problems our world is facing with an especially impactful organisation, let alone achieve setting up such an organisation oneself. Volunteering is great, but bills will need to be paid at some point. Health, home situation, all sorts of things need to be taken into account. Effective giving while working a possibly rather un-impactful job may still be a much more accessible, attainable way of putting EA principles into practice, for most mere mortals anyway.
** Edit: maybe this should be a quick take instead?
I don’t think there’s an “endgame” for EA—suffering will always be around, so there’s never really a point where we can say, “We’ve done enough". The ongoing challenge gives me purpose. Without suffering, there’s no meaning—like how there’s no hero without a villain.
But rather than seeing that as a never-ending grind, maybe it’s more like being on a path with ourselves, our actions, and the people we meet. If you can enjoy the roses along the way, drink a fine wine with your loved ones, and rest on a quaint bench to take a breather, isn’t it kind of nice to keep walking?
Loving this poetic reply! Fundamentally, yes, suffering will never end. And the amount of effort a person can put into countering it, is rather limited, so one may as well try to enjoy oneself. However, I think I was looking for an interpretation more close to Conor Barnes' below.
One example I can think of with regards to people "graduating" from philosophies is the idea that people can graduate out of arguably "adolescent" political philosophies like libertarianism and socialism. Often this looks like people realizing society is messy and that simple political philosophies don't do a good job of capturing and addressing this.
However, I think EA as a philosophy is more robust than the above: There are opportunities to address the immense suffering in the world and to address existential risk, some of these opportunities are much more impactful than others, and it's worth looking for and then executing on these opportunities. I expect this to be true for a very long time.
In general I think effective giving is the best opportunity for most people. We often get fixated on the status of directly working on urgent problems, which I think is a huge mistake. Effective giving is a way to have a profound impact, and I don't like to think of it as something just "for mere mortals" -- I think there's something really amazing about people giving a portion of their income every year to save lives and health, and I think doing so makes you as much an EA as somebody whose job itself is impactful.
Despite the people in the EA/rat-sphere dismissing socialism out of hand as an "adolescent" political philosophy, actual political philosophers who study this for a living are mostly socialists (socialism 59%, capitalism 27%, other 14%)
Thank you for this perspective. I very much agree with your last paragraph!
I don't think that EA should be graduated from. I think that it's a matter of continuing to develop in both the "effective" and "altruistic" components.
With "Effective", I'd say we're talking about an epistemological process. There, you're trying to learn the relevant knowledge about the world and yourself such that the resources within your control that you are deciding to deploy for altruistic purposes are deployed such that they can do the most good.
With "Altruism", that would be digging deep within yourself so that you can deploy more of those resources. The ideal, in my mind, would be having no more partiality to your own interests than those of other conscious beings across space, species, and/or time.
So, I don't see an endpoint, but rather a constant striving for knowledge, wisdom, and will.