This is really interesting. I have a lot of thoughts about this (most of which I might elaborate in a separate post) but I’ll post a quick summary here.
I think one of the biggest challenges to spreading EA right now is perhaps that we rely too much on word-of-mouth. It would be better to have some sort of centralized social media or infrastructure that we can use to share EA more broadly. EA.com is a very good one, but even that requires a large amount of reading, and people might be put off by the large amount of learning/background info needed to get involved.
In Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast & Slow”, he repeatedly points out that the main way in which most people decide to donate to charities is by intensity matching—they look at a charity (e.g., saving dolphins), quickly assess how much they feel about a certain cause (“yeah, I care a bit about saving dolphins”) and then match a net value to that amount (“sure, I’ll donate $50 to that”). Most charities draw on a person’s System 1.
EA, of course, does not do this. EA’s core tenet is basically to draw upon someone’s System 2, and as a result, it almost excludes people who donate to charities based on S1. Perhaps one could argue that since we want EA to teach people to actively use their S2 to evaluate charities, not catering to S1-centric charity evaluators might be desirable. However, I think the net utility gained from:
a) widely promoting S1-type ad campaigns,
b) still allowing people to access S2-type information
would generate a lot more money and involvement than just making an S2 hard-sell. This is not too different from EAs who say “Yes, I’ll donate to GiveWell’s top charities [even though I don’t want to spend the time to actually learn why these charities are effective myself]”.
tl;dr: To actively promote EA and reach wider audiences, we should be doing more to produce the heartwrenching sob-story ad campaigns (youtube videos, etc.) that other big name charities do, and only really promote the analysis to people who have interest in hearing it.
This is really interesting. I have a lot of thoughts about this (most of which I might elaborate in a separate post) but I’ll post a quick summary here.
I think one of the biggest challenges to spreading EA right now is perhaps that we rely too much on word-of-mouth. It would be better to have some sort of centralized social media or infrastructure that we can use to share EA more broadly. EA.com is a very good one, but even that requires a large amount of reading, and people might be put off by the large amount of learning/background info needed to get involved.
In Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast & Slow”, he repeatedly points out that the main way in which most people decide to donate to charities is by intensity matching—they look at a charity (e.g., saving dolphins), quickly assess how much they feel about a certain cause (“yeah, I care a bit about saving dolphins”) and then match a net value to that amount (“sure, I’ll donate $50 to that”). Most charities draw on a person’s System 1.
EA, of course, does not do this. EA’s core tenet is basically to draw upon someone’s System 2, and as a result, it almost excludes people who donate to charities based on S1. Perhaps one could argue that since we want EA to teach people to actively use their S2 to evaluate charities, not catering to S1-centric charity evaluators might be desirable. However, I think the net utility gained from:
a) widely promoting S1-type ad campaigns,
b) still allowing people to access S2-type information
would generate a lot more money and involvement than just making an S2 hard-sell. This is not too different from EAs who say “Yes, I’ll donate to GiveWell’s top charities [even though I don’t want to spend the time to actually learn why these charities are effective myself]”.
tl;dr: To actively promote EA and reach wider audiences, we should be doing more to produce the heartwrenching sob-story ad campaigns (youtube videos, etc.) that other big name charities do, and only really promote the analysis to people who have interest in hearing it.