doing more good vs. doing the most good possible

I think that "EA budget" is often interpreted too narrowly, in a few ways. So I strongly support the idea that we should be accepting and supportive of people doing more good, even if it's not the most good they can do, in a few ways. 

 For example, you mention "money spent more effectively on causes that aren't popular in the EA community [which can] result in more money being available to spend on EA causes." That's definitely a great investment - if supporting High Impact Athletes to get them to donate effectively is good, supporting effectiveness in music education to encourage others to think about effectiveness can also be effective. If talking to people about effectiveness in other areas gets a couple people to look into EA, it will be very useful!

And even without moving money to EA areas, this can be effective. For example, if I can spend time talking to people about effect interventions in domestic education in ways that convince 100 people to donate $1,000 a month to a charity that improves lives by 1 QALY for $1,000, which is well below the bar for effective charities, instead of one which improves lives by 1 QALY per $10,000, I've effectively improved their collective charity by over 1,000 QALY per year - which is very plausibly more good than I would do spending that time working directly to create QALYs directly.

And from a decision-theory perspective, within our "EA Budget," I also think there is room for what you're discussing when you mention that  we can "create new projects with the potential to be even more effective, perhaps even addressing some of the root causes of global inequities." This is due to Value of Information. If we have a half dozen charities that save lives for under $10,000, and another hundred which seem promising as new projects, where we don't know about the cost-per -life-saved, or whichever metric we are using, it makes sense to do some level of exploration into those hundred charities.

I also think that for people with sufficient income, there are non-EA things which should also be done wth money. For example, it's really good to support organizations you benefit from, such as donating to the local library and paying dues to NPR - not as altruistic expenses, but as part of a budget where you're not freeloading. (I've said the same about spending on offsetting my CO2 emissions.) And I also agree with Julia that it's also good to give money to things you care about, even apart from EA money and personal spending - so I will donate to a friend's campaigns to raise money for ineffective charities, because I want to support my friend. And to be clear, none of this last set of things is my EA budget, so I don't count it towards that total - and still think it's important to do.

I see the "incremental" vs. "optimal" approach as a bit of a false dichotomy , in the sense that it seems like what you're really arguing for (or at least what I'd argue for) is that EA needs more on-ramps. As you mentioned, plant-based burgers normalize veganism and give folks a clearer path to caring about animals. Donating to US-based GiveDirectly leads to donating abroad.

Given the multiple orders of magnitude of difference in effectiveness between US and developing country charities (to take global wellbeing as an example cause area), it seems difficult to argue on the merits of "doing more good" if it doesn't lead to even more good from that person/group, i.e. if there isn't momentum or a flywheel effect on someone's altruism. But as a "Big Tent EA," I would love to see more focus on EA on-ramps because that compounding effect seems real and substantial to me.

But maybe I'm biased because I followed that path? Hopefully still!

the social movement of Effective Altruism would be able to do the most good if it encouraged people to do incrementally more good instead of holding a gold standard of people dedicating their lives to the cause. Most people aren't able to...donate most of their income due to lack of motivation, executive function, resources, or other reasons

I'm not sure of this representation of the views of Effective Altruists. Effective altruists aren't expected to donate most of their income (whether they optimise their career for EA  or not) and very few do so. And the fact that there are psychological reasons against being too self-sacrificial has been admitted and extensively discussed within EA (e.g. here, here, here, and here, and many other posts).

The notion that EA should focus more on making work on causes that aren't identified as effective within EA more effective was discussed in this post. It's a big question with lots of considerations. One argument against is, however, that the differences in cost-effectiveness between cause areas may be big, meaning that steering resources towards the most effective cause areas may be very important. Another is that a reduced focus on effectiveness may lead to lowered intellectual standards and general dilution of the EA message. But there are many other considerations to take into account.

To some extent SoGive will be implementing what you're suggesting. As well as the overall top, EA-recommended charities, we are also looking to identify the best charities within other cause areas (e.g. poverty/homelessness in the UK, developed world health, tree-planting charities). Ideally we want to nudge people to switch to the overall top charities regardless of cause area, but we know that a lot of people are very committed to a particular cause, so it could be quite valuable to help them at least identify the top charities within that cause.

I agree.  I've also found it a bit paralyzing to browse these boards.  I find an organization I think is doing great work then find a post laying out how the organization is not as good as it seems and I don't want to 'waste' my money on a sub-optimal charitable donation. 

Small flag (in case newcomers are reading this): "donate" is not the same thing as "do good" - which also includes using your career, time, influence and other kinds of capital!

(If you replace "donate" with "use resources" I think most of the discussion in the post and the comments is still pretty accurate!)

Thank you for posting this! Incremental improvement in collaboration with "non-EA" individuals, groups and organizations could be more effective than working with EA-only individuals, groups and organizations.

Thanks for posting this, I have had similar thoughts/questions in the past and briefly talked with a few people about it, but I don’t think I’ve posted much about it on the forum.

I was especially interested in a point/thread you mentioned about people perceiving many charities as having similar effectiveness and that this may be an impediment to people getting interested in effective altruism. I’m not familiar with the research/arguments there, but yeah it sounds like if that is true it might be beneficial/effective to first “meet people where they are” (in terms of cause passions/focuses/neutrality) by showing the differences in effectiveness in that one cause area: I imagine that part of the reason that some people may resistant to believing in high differences in impact is some (perhaps unconscious) motivated reasoning since they don’t want to acknowledge their current passion is not very comparatively impactful.

In other words, if people are resistant to changing their minds in part because of a reinforcing loop of “I don’t want to admit I may be wrong about my passion/cause area,” “many charities have similar impacts,” and “What I am doing is impactful,” one may be able to more effectively change people’s thoughts about the second point by highlighting differences in charity effectiveness within a cause area. Specifically, this could help by sidestepping the “I don’t want to change my cause area” motivated reasoning/resistance. Of course, many people might still be resistant to changing their minds more broadly, and this all depends on the extent to which that claim about people’s perceptions of effectiveness is true, but it seems like it might be helpful for some people.

i like that you included a further reading section.

What do you think of:

Effective altruism is a philosophical and social movement where people use reasoning and evidence to do the most good with some of their resources. The key is 'with some of their resources.' It is better than saying 'with their spare resources,' because if one approaches e. g.  30% of their networks to implement EA-related changes, then the definition would be inaccurate because these networks are not 'spare;' it is also better than saying 'with their philanthropically allocated resources' or something else that includes 'allocated' because that connotes staticity of the extent and a distinction between philanthropically and non-philanthropically 'utilized' 'resources' (which may make the definition inaccurate when someone uses some of their resources partly  in a good maximizing manner and partly in another way). 

This definition can be also acceptable to people who can think about how much of resources they can do good with and how, as opposed to thinking in absolutes or competitive terms.

The issue can be that 'some of their resources' is vague, so the institutional understanding of an ok extent of resources (any which does not prevent people from engaging in what truly makes them happy, such as sharing great times with others, and having a facile life?) needs to be maintained.

I am also writing 'reasoning and evidence' (first 'reasoning,' also as opposed to 'reason,' and then 'evidence') because thus readers can understand the process of coming up with solutions based on the information that they find and can trust as opposed to being given evidence (which connotes incriminating evidence at court) and being empowered to assert it by 'reason' (implying a framework under one which is right and thus should not be argued against).