When the paradigm change happens, I’d give even odds as to whether the name “EA” attaches to the new thing or disappears. Sometimes, the paradigm shift is able to be explained as the way of doing what they always wanted to be doing but didn’t quite do right, and sometimes the people who make the switch early are people who were outside the term.
Consider the way that modern biology is said to be Darwinian even though in the late 19th and early 20th century, Mendelian genetics with its discrete units of heredity from a “gene pool” was thought to be this one idea that Darwinian theory could never accommodate, with its demand for constantly varying traits that bring species completely outside what they had been.
If sufficiently high status EAs adopt some revolutionary new idea for thinking about philanthropy that is at odds with the kinds of measurements and observations they’ve been doing, then the new thing could be called EA.
But Lamarckism wasn't the new paradigm competing with Darwinism - Mendelism was! To a Neo-Darwinian, we don't think of Mendelism and Darwinism as competitors, but they clearly were at the time - Darwin said traits had continuous variation around the traits of the parents, so that small differences can accumulate; Mendel said traits had binary variation, so that the only differences possible were those already in the gene pool. Once we understood that most traits were controlled by many genes, and that there are rare mutations in any, we were able to synthesize these.
When the paradigm change happens, I’d give even odds as to whether the name “EA” attaches to the new thing or disappears. Sometimes, the paradigm shift is able to be explained as the way of doing what they always wanted to be doing but didn’t quite do right, and sometimes the people who make the switch early are people who were outside the term.
Consider the way that modern biology is said to be Darwinian even though in the late 19th and early 20th century, Mendelian genetics with its discrete units of heredity from a “gene pool” was thought to be this one idea that Darwinian theory could never accommodate, with its demand for constantly varying traits that bring species completely outside what they had been.
If sufficiently high status EAs adopt some revolutionary new idea for thinking about philanthropy that is at odds with the kinds of measurements and observations they’ve been doing, then the new thing could be called EA.
But a synthesis was eventually found, and the underpinnings of modern biology are much closer to Darwinism than to Lamarckism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Darwinism
But Lamarckism wasn't the new paradigm competing with Darwinism - Mendelism was! To a Neo-Darwinian, we don't think of Mendelism and Darwinism as competitors, but they clearly were at the time - Darwin said traits had continuous variation around the traits of the parents, so that small differences can accumulate; Mendel said traits had binary variation, so that the only differences possible were those already in the gene pool. Once we understood that most traits were controlled by many genes, and that there are rare mutations in any, we were able to synthesize these.