When we talk about EA, we're talking about a quite specific set of values & practices (such as evidence-based reasoning, cause prioritization, etc.) and institutions (such as CEA, Animal Charity Evaluators, etc.). If someone said "Oh yeah, I'm an effective altruist - I always look at Charity Navigator before donating to make sure the overhead is low," then that wouldn't necessarily be considered Effective Altruism. I've been capitalizing it in my communications over the past year while working as the community organizer for EA NYC, but now I'm wondering whether I was right to do so... 😶
Let me know what you all think! Curious to hear where you stand!
Thanks for writing this! I used to write it as Effective Altruism, and once I noticed that a lot of articles and people refer to it in lowercase, I switched to using that. But it wasn't that clear to me why I should be using lowercase until you wrote this.
Anyway, I just noticed now that on the effectivealtruism.org website, the navigation bar says "Introduction to Effective Altruism", and also the parts "Articles > Introduction to Effective Altruism", the title of that post, and the link to that post on the homepage, under "Reading". That is probably wo... (read more)
I think the only inconsistency I see is the capitalization of 'effective altruism' in the navigation bar. The 'Introduction to Effective Altruism' article is capitalized simply because all the articles in that section use title case. In any case, I agree with the overall point that it makes sense to make sure capitalization is consistent throughout the site (and I personally agree it should not be capitalized).