When you talk about the negatives of selling, you focus on the personal negatives. I think there may also be substantial negatives in the longer term for the amount of good people do in the world. The basic mechanism is that people only get first impressions of a set of ideas (such as effective altruism) once, and if you give them a negative impression this could colour their future reactions and turn them off the ideas, when if their first experience was more positive they might end up supportive.
I think it’s important to be aware of and steer clear of these dangers. In a forthcoming report I look into how we can estimate the true counterfactual impact of different activities which impact movement growth. Right now my impression of your email is that it is probably net positive if we can gather useful information and learn from it, but might well be net negative to scale up.
The people I emailed are very unlikely to hear about effective charity or effective altruism (through some medium that they seriously register) in any other way.
This could be true in the short term. In the longer term I think we should hope that the concept takes off, as environmentalism has, and that most people will hear about it, so “very unlikely” seems unduly pessimistic.
Thanks for this Tom.
When you talk about the negatives of selling, you focus on the personal negatives. I think there may also be substantial negatives in the longer term for the amount of good people do in the world. The basic mechanism is that people only get first impressions of a set of ideas (such as effective altruism) once, and if you give them a negative impression this could colour their future reactions and turn them off the ideas, when if their first experience was more positive they might end up supportive.
I think it’s important to be aware of and steer clear of these dangers. In a forthcoming report I look into how we can estimate the true counterfactual impact of different activities which impact movement growth. Right now my impression of your email is that it is probably net positive if we can gather useful information and learn from it, but might well be net negative to scale up.
The people I emailed are very unlikely to hear about effective charity or effective altruism (through some medium that they seriously register) in any other way.
This could be true in the short term. In the longer term I think we should hope that the concept takes off, as environmentalism has, and that most people will hear about it, so “very unlikely” seems unduly pessimistic.
I think it’s appropriately pessimistic, or, as I’d prefer to put it, realistic ;)
I’d love to hear your view on the 10th percentile / median / 90th percentile sizes the group reaches before stagnating.