Candidly, I’m embarrassed to share any affiliation I have with EA to colleagues and non-close peers.
I only realised this recently, but honestly I think most people are embarrassed to share almost any ethical (political, religious, philosophical, etc) affiliation with their colleagues and non-close peers. So I think that avoiding that is an unreasonable standard to expect or be aiming for.
This didn’t have to be this way and frankly, given the virtue of EA, it takes a special type of failure to have steered the community down this path.
I can see why you’d see things this way as an EA adherent. But I’m sure many members of various political parties, movements, religious groups etc feel the same—given that our ideas are so obviously incredibly virtuous, it’s exceptionally bad that our leaders have nevertheless managed to make us look bad to most people outside of the community (i.e. the set of people who don’t think it looks so good that they’ve joined).
I think EA would be significantly better served if a number of leading EA orgs and thought leaders dramatically reevaluated their role, strategy and involvement with EA.
PR is hard. Extremely hard. Otherwise you wouldn’t have this situation where affiliations with pretty much any group generally lose you a bit of status in the eyes of people outside those groups. I think a better indicator of success is growth, assuming you want growth. And I actually think that when ‘EA’ has wanted growth, we’ve generally been very good at it.
And that’s in spite of the limitation of a significant fraction of the community chastising others in the community for ever caring about PR.
It seems like you’re ignoring that he said EA has an actively bad reputation, and viewing this as a generic claim about not wanting to share a view others don’t embrace.
I reeeeeaally don’t want to get into harmful stereotypes here obviously so I’ll just pick a few real examples in my own case: when I’ve told old colleagues, family, school-friends etc that I was vegan, an environmentalist, a feminist, I think their reaction was quite a bit worse than simply “I don’t agree.” But maybe we move in different circles.
Of course it may be the case that EA really does have “an awful reputation and most people view the community with contempt and it’s ideas as noxious.” But as any movement grows it’s bound to attract more and more bad (and good) press, and you’re going to feel embarrassed talking about it, and in times of bad press it may well feel like it’s taken over your entire brand and it’s doomed and it’s taken “a special type of failure” to cause this and leadership should “dramatically reevaluate” their involvement in EA i.e. I’m generally expecting people to be more pessimistic than they should be right now.
And even before all this I’d been noticing in myself that I was taking “I’m embarrassed to tell people I’m an EA” as a doom-y sign, but then I realised basically all causes have this effect so that in itself is not sufficient for me to conclude that we’d done a really bad job of PR. So I wanted to point this out to anyone I suspected was thinking similarly.
I only realised this recently, but honestly I think most people are embarrassed to share almost any ethical (political, religious, philosophical, etc) affiliation with their colleagues and non-close peers. So I think that avoiding that is an unreasonable standard to expect or be aiming for.
I can see why you’d see things this way as an EA adherent. But I’m sure many members of various political parties, movements, religious groups etc feel the same—given that our ideas are so obviously incredibly virtuous, it’s exceptionally bad that our leaders have nevertheless managed to make us look bad to most people outside of the community (i.e. the set of people who don’t think it looks so good that they’ve joined).
PR is hard. Extremely hard. Otherwise you wouldn’t have this situation where affiliations with pretty much any group generally lose you a bit of status in the eyes of people outside those groups. I think a better indicator of success is growth, assuming you want growth. And I actually think that when ‘EA’ has wanted growth, we’ve generally been very good at it.
And that’s in spite of the limitation of a significant fraction of the community chastising others in the community for ever caring about PR.
It seems like you’re ignoring that he said EA has an actively bad reputation, and viewing this as a generic claim about not wanting to share a view others don’t embrace.
I reeeeeaally don’t want to get into harmful stereotypes here obviously so I’ll just pick a few real examples in my own case: when I’ve told old colleagues, family, school-friends etc that I was vegan, an environmentalist, a feminist, I think their reaction was quite a bit worse than simply “I don’t agree.” But maybe we move in different circles.
Of course it may be the case that EA really does have “an awful reputation and most people view the community with contempt and it’s ideas as noxious.” But as any movement grows it’s bound to attract more and more bad (and good) press, and you’re going to feel embarrassed talking about it, and in times of bad press it may well feel like it’s taken over your entire brand and it’s doomed and it’s taken “a special type of failure” to cause this and leadership should “dramatically reevaluate” their involvement in EA i.e. I’m generally expecting people to be more pessimistic than they should be right now.
And even before all this I’d been noticing in myself that I was taking “I’m embarrassed to tell people I’m an EA” as a doom-y sign, but then I realised basically all causes have this effect so that in itself is not sufficient for me to conclude that we’d done a really bad job of PR. So I wanted to point this out to anyone I suspected was thinking similarly.