Talk:Effective altruism

Ideas for improvement
I have some miscellaneous ideas for restructuring and improving the article, although I don't have time to implement all of them right now.

I've already implemented the following changes:
 * Move all of the "Themes" from the "Practice" section to the "Philosophy" section.
 * Move the content in the cause neutrality section into the Impartiality and Cause prioritization sections.
 * Rename the "Entrepreneurship" section to "Founding effective organizations", focusing more on organizations founded for the purpose of direct impact, and move the SBF to the earning to give section.

General feedback: Qzekrom (she/her • talk) 16:32, 16 September 2022 (UTC)
 * I think the tone should be more formal and encyclopedic overall, and more technical in some places. We shouldn't overwhelm the reader with EA jargon, but it's important to introduce at least the most important technical terms used by EA, to be concise and to respect the reader's intellect. For example, I changed the following sentence:
 * Before: Others include people who don't exist yet as possible beneficiaries and try to promote the long-term well-being of humanity by, for example, reducing risks to civilization, humans, and planet Earth.
 * After: Those who subscribe to longtermism include future generations as possible beneficiaries and try to improve the moral value of the long-term future by, for example, reducing existential risks.
 * Although the two are related, I think it's important to decouple effective altruism from utilitarianism as much as possible. We should avoid using terms like "well-being" and "reducing suffering" as synonyms for moral value unless they're used that way in the source. For example, the 80K introduction to longtermism emphasizes the plurality of views that can support longtermism. In the example sentence above, which cites this source, I changed "long-term well-being of humanity" to "moral value of the long-term future" to reflect this.
 * The three major camps of EA correspond to schools of thought regarding which beings should be considered moral patients, or can be helped in practice. The global health and development camp largely focuses on human beings in the present, the animal welfare camp adds non-human animals in the present, and the longtermist camp adds future generations. So I think the Cause priorities section belongs right after (or in) the Philosophy section as it's closely related to EA philosophy.
 * We should add sources about the beliefs and disagreements of these schools of thought. For example, Ajeya Cotra's 80K interview on worldview diversification provides a metaphor of a "train to crazy town", which could be helpful for describing these disagreements. Open Philanthropy's blog posts on worldview diversification could also be helpful.
 * We should also explain why members of the global health and well-being (non-longtermist) camp continue to focus on near-term, easily measurable causes. There are sources where Alexander Berger and Elie Hassenfeld explain their thoughts on longtermism.
 * We should explain in greater detail why AI safety and biosecurity are considered top priorities by longtermists. Right now, there's only two sentences in the longtermism/GCRs section about this. As this is a dominant view in the EA movement, I think it deserves its due weight.
 * We should rename the "Practice" section to "Approaches".
 * The "Founding effective organizations" section reads like a laundry list of EA orgs. We only need a few examples to illustrate how organizations can be founded on EA principles. We can also name meta-orgs like Charity Entrepreneurship, which incubates EA nonprofits.
 * I think it would be good to add a subsection about incremental vs. systemic change to the Approaches section. This could absorb what's left of the Criticism section.
 * Relatedly, we should be consistent about whether we weave criticism into the article as a whole or put it in a dedicated "Criticism" section. Since we've been trending towards weaving it into the article, this would be going all the way.
 * We can also rename the "Philosophy" section to "Core principles", since the cause priorities/schools of thought section also counts as EA philosophy.


 * I like your suggestions! I do think though that some of the details about longtermism should be incorporated in the longtermism article, which should then probably be excerpted here, e.g. We should explain in greater detail why AI safety and biosecurity are considered top priorities by longtermists Ruthgrace (talk) 19:07, 24 September 2022 (UTC)

Citing Muehlhauser 2013
My understanding is that Meuhlhauser, 2013, "Four Focus Areas of Effective Altruism" is a very important essay in the field of effective altruism. It was recently removed from the page by Biogeographist and Greyfell as an Internet Forum. The guideline says, "Content from websites whose content is largely user-generated is generally unacceptable." The Effective Altruism Forum is a place where users generate content, but it is where many of the most important essays in the field are published. It seems odd to remove the content for a topic because the leading thinkers on that topic choose to publish their works on a certain venue, and there is still much user-generated content, such as Tweets, cited on Wikipedia. I think this should be an exception to the "generally" rule-of-thumb. What do others think, ideally those with subject matter expertise? Jmill1806 (talk) 12:52, 10 October 2022 (UTC)
 * said in their edit summary restoring the forum post (which was then removed again for good reasons that I will address in a moment) that removing it "would be like disallowing a famous Reddit post on the Reddit page because it's on Reddit." That's not true; this page is not about the EA Forum (which is what is analogous to Reddit), it's about effective altruism. I understand that there are exceptions to WP:UGC and I've advocated for one exception myself: a post by William MacAskill, which I only considered an exception because MacAskill is notable enough to have his own Wikipedia article and because some relevant facts in it were not in other sources, although now that I look again at how the MacAskill post is cited, it seems to be overcited now—it's cited five times now instead of two times like it once was, and it's possible that the relevant facts are available in independent sources. So I am open to reconsidering whether that one should be an exception. As for Muehlhauser, I don't see how it's an exception: he's not notable enough to have his own Wikipedia article, and the facts that the source aims to verify are available in non-WP:UGC sources.
 * I don't accept that the EA Forum is a good source in general, so I can't accept restoring the Muehlhauser post on that basis. You have to view it in light of this article's long history of edits by EA enthusiasts who overcite sources like blogs and forums related to EA. (This has been discussed several times in the talk page archives.) I imagine the EA Forum seems important to those who participate in it, but those of us who don't can see that it's just another Internet forum. Biogeographist (talk) 16:35, 10 October 2022 (UTC)
 * I agree with Biogeographist that forum posts are not considered appropriate sources on Wikipedia, and so EA Forum posts shouldn't be cited. But I think the reason why many EAs are irked by this is because the EA Forum is not "just another Internet forum". Many articles there effectively go through a peer review-like process — authors will create a draft which is shared with several others, then edits are made prior to publishing, and finally when articles are published, they are reviewed by the community as a whole using a karma system where the most dedicated EAs have far more of an ability to upvote posts than newer users, and these users have the ability to use a strong upvote to indicate even stronger approval, effectively vetting articles posted on the site.
 * Not all posts go through this process. The EA Forum does allow independent publishing without prior review. And, unlike traditional peer review, the articles that fail still get published; they just get published with a low karma count and in less conspicuous places. But all posts do go through the karma system, so articles can only get a high upvote count if either lots of newer users upvote it, or if a sufficient number of dedicated EAs upvote it.
 * I think it is clear that the EA Forum is definitively not just another Internet forum. Posts that do well on the EA Forum are, in my opinion, more vetted than many publishers require, and, for many posts, it is closer to something peer-review-like than outsiders realize. If Wikipedia were able to make isolated exceptions to its rules, I would advocate for such an exception to certain parts of the EA Forum. But I do not believe Wikipedia should make such exceptions (that seems wholly untenable), and so the EA Forum is unfortunately not usable as a source here.
 * Even though I concur with Biogeographist that forum posts shouldn't be used as sources on Wikipedia, I don't consider the EA Forum to be anything like other Internet fora, and I think it is a shame that Wikipedia must use broadly scoped rules rather than allow independent exceptions where it would make sense, like with the EA Forum. &mdash; Eric Herboso 20:11, 10 October 2022 (UTC)
 * Thanks,, those are important considerations. On further reflection, I agree that not all Internet forums are equal; those that consistently enforce a code of conduct and content guidelines and that have a good reputation system like, for example, Stack Exchange (which is technically a Q&A website) are not the same as those that are just a free-for-all. Still, I think the WP:UGC guideline is right that even a site like Stack Exchange or the EA Forum shouldn't automatically be considered an appropriate source, since the minimal standards are so low even though some posts are very good, and each post has to be evaluated individually. I hope it was clear in my previous comment that I do think individual posts like MacAskill's or Muehlhauser's could be considered acceptable sources with good supporting arguments, but what I don't accept is the argument that the EA Forum is a reliable source in general therefore any given post is an appropriate source, especially when better sources are available for the same claim. Biogeographist (talk) 15:22, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
 * I don't mind the notion that the EA forum isn't a good source. In fact, I probably agree. But I do think that sometimes makes it *really hard* to explain useful facts about EA. Honestly, sometimes I try and add things here which are against the common EA narrative, but they are still removed for lacking sources 2A02:C7C:393C:4200:759F:E3BA:828B:FA24 (talk) 09:37, 12 October 2022 (UTC)
 * I appreciate your clarification and further reflection, . I absolutely agree that "even a site like Stack Exchange or the EA Forum shouldn't automatically be considered an appropriate source, since the minimal standards are so low even though some posts are very good, and each post has to be evaluated individually," and I would also reject the claim that "the EA Forum is a reliable source in general therefore any given post is an appropriate source, especially when better sources are available for the same claim." We might be on the same page now. Jmill1806 (talk) 14:48, 15 November 2022 (UTC)

Citing EA Forum on sexual misconduct

 * I'm new to Wikipedia as an editor, so I want to approach this with humility. I wish to discuss how I've added context to the sexual misconduct issue presented in the lead section: I explained that the community responded by discussing how to create a better environment, which I deem as relevant info to understanding the reaction by effective altruists, and I used the EA Forum as a reference. I understand the point that using a forum as evidence for general statements is not typically accepted, but the situation I highlighted seems different because, in order to explain how the community reacted to the situation, it is intuitive to reference the community's reaction. In this case, the context of the citation relies not on specific details of the reference, but on the mere existence of the discussion within it. I'm open to different opinions on this, and please try to see if that is reasonable. Pedro Araújo Writes (talk) 05:02, 25 December 2023 (UTC)
 * An EA Forum post titled "If you'd like to do something about sexual misconduct and don't know what to do..." (emphasis added) with caveats like "The post is not attempting to persuade anyone who isn't already convinced that it's worth taking action" and "It's just my take on what might be helpful to do", and with comments by only 3 people, is not exactly impressive evidence of noteworthy "conversations inside the community" that would be worth mentioning in this article, even leaving aside the problem that it's WP:UGC. Biogeographist (talk) 12:34, 25 December 2023 (UTC)
 * The article starts by citing two other articles written by members of the community discussing the issue, "Share the burden" (which had 51 comments) and "Things that can make EA a good place for women" (which had 30 comments). That was the reason I chose to cite this article rather than the other two. If that's the problem, I could cite those two. You also mentioned WP:UGC, but isn't it associated with the reliability of the information? (Please correct me if I'm wrong.) In this case, the statement I presented in the lead section simply acknowledges that the community has discussed the issue, which it has as demonstrated by the citations, so there doesn't seem to be a problem of trustworthiness. Pedro Araújo Writes (talk) 21:06, 25 December 2023 (UTC)
 * OK, I didn't look at the other 2 posts you mentioned because the links to them were very easy to overlook. Those 2 seem to be more relevant since they show discussion, but it would be much better to have a good secondary-source summary of the discussion instead of just pointing to the discussion on an Internet forum. It's not just an issue of verifying the claim, but also of showing that the claim is noteworthy enough to mention. I'm not sure how to evaluate the latter without a secondary source. For now, I will restore your addition with the 2 alternative citations. But I'm not sure that I would defend it if someone else reverts it again. Biogeographist (talk) 03:28, 26 December 2023 (UTC)
 * User:19h00s removed the sentence "Propelled by the situation, members of the community discussed how to create an environment more capable of preventing and fighting sexual misconduct" and its references. I am noting the removal here, where the sentence and its references were previously discussed. Biogeographist (talk) 15:52, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
 * I think it's definitely a worthwhile topic to cover, but the EA forum is simply not a reliable source. I read through all the conversations here, but there is no way in my mind that a self-described internet forum - no matter how respected or widely read/praised it may be - can be the sole source of validation for the information that it was cited for in this case. If another editor were able to find a reliable, notable, secondary source that details the fact that there were conversations within the EA community about combatting sexual misconduct, then you could use that as the establishing source. But as it was used in the article before I made edits, those sources essentially served to validate original research. Reading through forums and deciding to frame what was said there as a larger trend among the movement is as "original research" as it gets, imo. 19h00s (talk) 15:57, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

EA Forum in Google Scholar
News related to the above discussion: Earlier this month, Google Scholar has started to return some EA Forum posts for some searches. This is relatively unusual, as Google Scholar only very rarely returns results from any fora. While this does strongly support that some articles on the EA Forum don't fall into the same category as other forum posts, this does not necessarily mean that we may use EA Forum posts that are listed on Google Scholar as a proper reliable source. According to WP:SCHOLARSHIP, EA Forum posts might still fail in terms of citation counts (although articles with no citation counts may still count as a reliable source in some situations). They may also count as WP:PREPRINT, which makes them generally unsuitable — but, in some cases, WP:SPS does apply, meaning isolated EA Forum posts may arguably be considered reliable. If we honestly can't cite something except by going through the EA Forum, and if the EA Forum article is listed by Google Scholar, and if the author has other articles listed by Google Scholar, then I think there may be a good argument for citing the EA Forum in that specific case. &mdash; Eric Herboso 15:36, 10 November 2022 (UTC)

Long-form Effective Altruism posts should be citable. They're much more similar to academic papers than to Reddit posts, often coming with their own citations and peer review. Papers published in scientific journals are also "user-edited", so clearly discretion is intended with regards to this Wikipedia guideline. I agree that the Effective Altruism forum *looks* like a traditional internet forum, but what matters is the content and the process used to generate that content, not the aesthetics. KingSupernova (talk) 05:32, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
 * When you say "Effective Altruism posts" I assume you mean EA Forum posts. The "About" page of the EA Forum shows that it is just a typical Internet forum. It says nothing about a scholarly peer review process that I can find. Papers published in scientific journals are also "user-edited". No, they're not; they are edited by selected experts. And nobody is claiming that the aesthetics of the EA Forum is the problem! The process the problem. EA Forum posts, long-form or not, are not automatically reliable sources. Biogeographist (talk) 16:44, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

Lacking sufficient discussion of association with FTX?
This article seems unduly slanted towards more theoretical and academic aspects of its subject. At this point in time, effective altruism is most notable for its association with FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried. Relegating discussion of that association to a criticism section seems to give undue weight to other less notable aspects of effective altruism. Discussing a philosophy that is primarily known for its real world impact and associations should give due and substantial weight to that impact and those associations.

Just Nogburt (talk) 15:24, 19 March 2023 (UTC)


 * Not sure I agree with you that it is most notable for its association with FTX. There has been a long push towards academicizing the article. But as someone who has largely stepped back from this article, I would say WP:SODOIT Xx78900 (talk) 19:31, 19 March 2023 (UTC)


 * I agree that the history section is currently too focused on books, but I don't think a whole paragraph on FTX is justified in the current scheme. In the scope of all the history of effective altruism, I think it would be useful to mention the bankruptcy of FTX, but maybe just in a paragraph on reputational issues from 2022 onwards. Does that seem reasonable? Jmill1806 (talk) 15:29, 22 March 2023 (UTC)


 * Why is a paragraph about FTX not justified? FTX was the largest fraud in the history of the world, in terms of number of victims.  The existence of FTX alone discredits the effective altruist movement.  The movement strived to do maximum good in the world that exceeds the bad, and FTX alone caused the movement to achieve exactly the opposite of its stated goals.  SBF and Caroline stole billions of dollars and instead of buying houses or cars, they gave the money to politicians and charities supporting EA.  No matter what the remnants of EA do from here on out, it's unlikely they will ever be able to do anything close to offsetting the millions of lives the movement ruined.  I'd actually argue that there should be more discussion about FTX, not less.  Quintin3265 (talk) 12:11, 3 June 2023 (UTC)
 * the millions of lives the movement ruined? Citation needed, my friend. Also, the comment to which you are responding is outdated; it refers to an older version of the article, and the article has been restructured since then. Biogeographist (talk) 22:33, 7 June 2023 (UTC)
 * It's not like if EA were officially endorsing unbridled "the end justifies the means" strategies, it seems like they rather warn against it ("Effective altruism does not mean supporting ‘ends justify the means’ reasoning [...]", https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/introduction-to-effective-altruism). Even William MacAskill, that is known for the "earning to give" strategy, warned against this kind of "naive calculation that justify harmful action", and stated before the FTX fraud that "violating rights is almost never the best way of bringing about positive longterm outcomes" (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WdeiPrwgqW2wHAxgT/a-personal-statement-on-ftx). Alenoach (talk) 15:34, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

POV template
Can the Point Of View maintenance template at the top of the article now be removed ? Alenoach (talk) 04:09, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

Effective altruism ≠ utilitarianism
An edit to the lead section that I reverted equated effective altruism with utilitarianism. This is not correct; for example: "Many take effective altruism to be synonymous with utilitarianism, the normative theory according to which an act is right if and only if it produces no less well‐being than any available act (see UTILITARIANISM; WELL‐BEING). This is a category mistake. Effective altruism is not utilitarianism, nor is it any other normative theory or claim. Instead, effective altruism is the of using evidence and reason to try to find out how to do the most good, and on this basis trying to do the most good [...] Since effective altruism is a project rather than a normative claim, it is possible for one to both adopt this project as well as accept a nonwelfarist conception of the good (or indeed to adopt multiple projects, some of which involve promoting welfarist good and some of which involve promoting nonwelfarist good)." Biogeographist (talk) 22:54, 29 November 2023 (UTC)

Effective altruists (term)
Welcome to Wikipedia! In your edit summary for this edit, you wrote: ‎Usage of "effective altruist" as a noun is not very common for most people pursuing the goals of effective altruism. I don't know what is your verifiable evidence for that claim, but ample evidence that the usage of the term (plural) as described is common enough in the published literature in general can be seen, for example, in the Google Scholar search results for the term. I have found many examples in other bibliographic databases as well over the past few years. More importantly, the term is used repeatedly in this Wikipedia article, so it needs to be succinctly defined at the start to avoid confusion. Biogeographist (talk) 01:47, 30 November 2023 (UTC)


 * Hi @Biogeographist thank you so much for all your work on Wikipedia!
 * I definitely agree that it's sometimes used, and it seems I was wrong in thinking its usage is "not very common".
 * But it still seems to me that not everyone uses that term, and I would keep "sometimes". I really don't know how to prove the negative that it's not always used, besides quoting internet forums and other non-reliable sources.
 * E.g. It seems to me that https://www.effectivealtruism.org, incl. https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/introduction-to-effective-altruism, and https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/ don't use the term, also I think this Google Scholar search result has articles using "effective altruism" but not "effective altruist(s)"
 * I'll leave it to you to consider if "sometimes" is an accurate characterization Recursing (talk) 10:30, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

"Such criticism has been described as not intellectual, but visceral"
added the following sentence, which I removed:
 * Such criticism has been described as not intellectual, but visceral.

What the cited source says is: "Effective altruism has many enemies, and while there are certainly philosophical arguments against it, much of the opposition is not intellectual but visceral." I find it difficult to accept this as worthy of an encyclopedia article, because it's just a claim in an opinion column in a student newspaper and is unsupported by evidence. The author fails to provide examples of opposition that "is not intellectual but visceral". Perhaps there's a Wikipedia guideline that's relevant, but my memory fails me at the moment. Biogeographist (talk) 03:23, 23 December 2023 (UTC)


 * Thanks. You are right. It's an interesting and probably a true point, but there are not enough good refs. to include. Asto77 (talk) 09:52, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

Now my brain is more awake and I realize that WP:RS is basically the relevant guideline. Biogeographist (talk) 16:13, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

Heading "EA choices sometimes unpalatable"
I removed the "EA choices sometimes unpalatable" heading that recently added. It doesn't strike me as a good summary because it's very WP:POV: Whose choices? Unpalatable to whom? And the subheading was at the beginning of the "Impartiality" section, and I'm not sure that the introduction to the section needs a subheading at all. For now, I moved all the relevant content under the "Criticism of impartiality" subheading. By the way, MacAskill's response to the Picasso scenario in 2015, recounted in that section, was obviously very utilitarian, but I'm not sure that he would give such a (dogmatically?) utilitarian response today about how effective altruists should behave in that scenario, judging based on how he has been more assiduous about differentiating EA from utilitarianism in more recent writings, e.g. in the International Encyclopedia of Ethics article on EA. Biogeographist (talk) 18:31, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

I am not the only one who has noticed the discrepancy between MacAskill's response to the Picasso scenario and his later writings on EA: see this comment in the EA Forum. If MacAskill has somewhere explicitly responded to this discrepancy, it would be great to add a sentence about it to the relevant paragraph in this Wikipedia article. Biogeographist (talk) 22:30, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

Trimming biased "criticism" section
As seen in the "criticism" section above on this talk page, the "criticism" section of the article appears to have been added not due to any particular criticism that was noteworthy enough to address, but simply because an editor felt that the article "needed" a criticism section, and then went looking for criticisms to support it. This is an... odd approach to editing, to say the least. Many articles on Wikipedia about various philosophies and social movements do not include any particular "criticism" section, so there is no a-priori need for one here.

Of course if there are noteworthy criticisms of the movement, then they should be mentioned, and indeed there are quite a few mentioned in the "controversies", "criticisms of impartiality", "notable publications and media", "criticisms of cause prioritization", "cost-effectiveness", "incremental versus systemic change", "long-term future and global catastrophic risks", "founding effective organizations", and "other prominent people" sections, along with the last paragraph of the introduction. In fact, out of 28 total sections and subsections of the article, 13 of them contain criticism of Effective Altruism. This is a substantially larger fraction than in comparable articles.

Many of those criticisms are reasonable and well-cited. In contrast, three out of the four criticisms in the standalone "criticisms" section are nonsensical.


 * EA is composed of about 30% women, which is much better than most adjacent fields; for example it's about twice as many as among Wikipedia editors. 76% are white, which is the base rate among the American population and therefore exactly what we'd expect to see from a welcoming and inclusive movement. And the provided sources do not back up this claim; the Vox article only makes a vague insinuation that "linking EA to programmers will not do much to bring more people from diverse backgrounds into the fold", which as the previous statistics show does not appear to be correct, and the Atlantic article simply claims the movement is non-diverse and then links to an EA forum post summarizing survey results that do not particularly back up that claim.
 * "Using math to justify actions" describes every technical field, ever. If this criticism doesn't apply to economists, political scientists, wall street traders, engineers, climate scientists, actuaries, game theorists, etc. then it doesn't apply here either. Additionally, it's unclear how this is supposed to be a criticism, since surely "avoiding checking the math when deciding what to do" is worse?
 * "Some gatherings and events are closed to outsiders" is also a typical feature of pretty much every social and professional group, ever. And in fact some cursory research into the subject suggests that many if not most EA events are open to the public. The citation for this criticism also does not back it up; the "cult-like" accusation in the Bloomburg article was levied at the rationalist community, not effective altruism. (While related, they are entirely separate movements. Most people in one do not identify as the other, and there are significant philosophical disagreements between the two.)

These criticisms are embarrassing. At best they fail a cursory check for basic logical validity, at worst they are actively deceptive. I have removed them.

(The accusation of hypocrisy for high spending and the purchase of Wytham Abbey actually makes sense, so I left it alone.)

KingSupernova (talk) 06:49, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
 * I didn't write any of the content that was removed, although I edited it after it was added. In general, I agree that what removed was weak, but the objection "Using math to justify actions" describes every technical field, ever is as biased a misinterpretation of that sentence as anything that was in the criticism section. The point of that poorly written sentence (and it was even more poorly written before I edited it, although clearly it wasn't edited enough if it could be misinterpreted so badly) is the "being used to justify self-serving spending" part, not the "math" part. There may be something worth salvaging there, but as I didn't add that sentence myself I'm not very motivated to try to fix it. I haven't critically examined the other objections above, which I hope are not as wrongheaded as the "Using math to justify actions" misinterpretation. Biogeographist (talk) 17:16, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
 * The general "their decisions seem kinda self-serving" criticism is reasonable, hence why I left in the section about the Wytham Abbey purchase. The ridiculous part is the implication that using math is somehow relevant to this. If they were self-serving in the same ways, but *avoided* using math to justify those decisions, would that be better? Doesn't seem like it. KingSupernova (talk) 04:22, 11 January 2024 (UTC)


 * The best way to "balance" the article, in my view, would be to rewrite the language the PR-speak introduction which EA's posters wrote before the problems with the movement came to light. I'm not sure why so many (in effect) self-published sources are still being used here.Essence of nightshade (talk) 01:46, 4 May 2024 (UTC)

"Differences from utilitarianism" section
added the following text under the heading "EA differences from utilitarianism":

I removed this because I don't think it says anything clear and important about the difference between EA and utilitarianism. But I agree it would be useful to have a subsection about this under "Impartiality". I don't have time to rewrite this now but will try to get to it soon. If you have other suggestions about such a section before I return, feel free to provide them here. I haven't yet read MacAskill's chapter in the Norton Introduction to Ethics that is cited, but I have read his chapters in the International Encyclopedia of Ethics and in Effective Altruism: Philosophical Issues, which were published around the same time. With all these sources (and perhaps others), we can write something better. Biogeographist (talk) 02:55, 31 December 2023 (UTC)

OK, I read MacAskill's chapter in the Norton Introduction to Ethics, and actually I didn't find it helpful on this issue, because in that chapter he's just arguing for obligations that could motivate people to pursue the goals of effective altruism, even though he notes at the beginning: "As defined by the leaders of the movement [...] effective altruism is a project, rather than a set of normative commitments." So it's like he's saying that EA as prominently defined doesn't make claims about obligations, but he's going to argue for claims about obligations that would make one want to engage in the project of EA. In contrast, there are (at least) a couple of other publications by MacAskill that I mentioned above that explicitly address the issue of differences from utilitarianism. I added a sentence in this edit that may satisfactorily address the issue based on those sources. Biogeographist (talk) 20:57, 1 January 2024 (UTC)

Approximate number of active members
I hesitate to remove "With approximately 7,000 people active in the effective altruism community" from the introduction. Not that the source is unreliable, but I just don't think these approximations can be very precise, notably given that it's unclear how to determine if someone is active in the community. On the other hand, even an imprecise approximation may be considered relevant information for readers. Alenoach (talk) 22:34, 16 May 2024 (UTC)
 * That bothers me as well. If possible, it would be good to add some qualification about how the EA community was defined to arrive at that number. Biogeographist (talk) 20:18, 17 May 2024 (UTC)
 * I don't have access to the source since it's pay walled. The figure may be based on the number of adherents to Giving what we can in 2022. I think it's probably better to just remove it from the introduction and perhaps add later in the article the number of pledgers to Giving what we can. Alenoach (talk) 23:41, 21 May 2024 (UTC)
 * I went ahead and removed it.Essence of nightshade (talk) 00:22, 22 May 2024 (UTC)