Seeking better name for "Effective Egoism"

effective altruists should be interested in spreading effective self-care both amongst others since altruism is about making others better off, and amongst themselves because if you take good care for yourself you are in a better position to help others, and if you are efficient about it you have more resources to help others.

Consider this line to have gotten an extra thumbs-up from me. :)

"Effective self-care" ... "Effective Egoism"

The fact that you have highlit the differences between these two closely-related concepts, which I hadn't managed to think through on my own, means this thread has been worthwhile whatever the result of the poll might be.

That's a very good suggestion list, and a good link; thank you kindly. :)

"Rationality" is the tool, but by itself, doesn't describe what goals and values the tool is being used to promote. There can be rational altruists, rational hedonists, rational omnicidal maniacs who want to eliminate suffering by eliminating life, rational egoists, and so on.

Rational self-care

(I apologize for not responding sooner; I've just realized I'm in one of my periodic bouts of anhedonia and social procrastination.)

My short absence seems to have given enough time to get a selection of votes in, and since I'm just about to actually apply the results of this discussion to my fiction, it's time to analyze the results.

I'm ruling out 'rational self-interest' as already being used to refer to a closely-related but not-quite-identical concept, so that I can have my characters discuss the differences.

First word:

• effective: 6
• rational: 6 (or 4)
• strategic: 3

It looks like 'rational' or 'effective' beat out all the other suggestions fairly handily. This happens to line up with my own instincts, so I'm willing to take it as confirmation.

Second word:

• self-interest: 5 (or 3)
• egoism: 4
• living: 2
• self-care: 2
• well-being: 1

And, again, it looks like we have two clear winners, with enough margin over the others to be confident they're actually the most popular.

Checking the votes of the available combinations of those, though

• effective self-interest: 3
• effective egoism: 2
• rational egoism: 1

... there isn't quite as clear a preference for any one over any of the others. (As in, a single weird voter could have skewed the results.) But it looks like either 'effective egoism' or 'effective self-interest' is going to win out. ... And, at least for fictional purposes, I think I'll apply the Crazy Straws principle and simply have continuing arguments over which of the two terms should be applied in any given case.

How bout "Egoism"?

Unfortunately, that term is somewhat overbroad, as it includes variants of egoism that I want to be able to avoid pointing to when I use 'Effective Egoism' (and/or its replacement term) to point to the specific category of egoism I'm focusing on. Eg, I want to avoid including certain forms of Randian Objectivism which lead to long-term harm, I want to exclude simple hedonism, and I definitely want to exclude uses of the term 'egoism' that aren't about the ethical aspects, such as psychological egoism.

if we cared about reaching out, some egoists we'd be, yeah?

I may be an egoist (by some definitions), and I may have schizoid personality disorder, but modern medicine has saved my life on more than one occasion, and if I subscribed to a form of egoism which disparaged such interactions, then I'd be doing myself harm. /Because/ I'm selfish, I care about promoting the good for other people, at least in certain specific ways.

Yes, yes, we are all fundamentally merely computational algorithms running on the same sort of hardware substrate made of stardust, with no fundamental differences between one another. But if one piece of the universe which my algorithms identify as 'other' comes towards the piece of the universe which my algorithms identify as 'myself' while waving a knife and screaming, I'm still going to treat the 'other' differently than I will treat 'myself' and give myself's desire to run a higher priority than the other's desire to grab my wallet. Other bits of stardust's algorithms will lead to different behaviours, such as surrendering the wallet freely, and my algorithms find it useful to have words that can describe the different behaviours differently. Thus, even if the underlying theory is false, being able to describe the dichotomy still has value in terms of instrumental rationality, and in this case (using a scifi terminology anology), there is no reason to coin a new word like 'smeerp' since the existing term 'rabbit' already exists and is generally understood well enough to allow both thought and communication.

Yes, I came across that term; but it doesn't quite fit, any more than the mere term 'altruism' fits the concept of 'effective altruism'.