This is a really well-thought out piece, and some excellent suggestions here!
I am especially worried about the points about being “cold-hearted,” “rationalist,” and “smug”—I agree that it’s how the movement comes off across to others. This is what I found myself in my project of spreading rational thinking, including about philanthropy and thus Effective Altruism, to a broad audience.
Here’s what I found helpful in my own outreach efforts to non-EAs.
First, to focus much more on speaking to people’s emotions rather than their cognition. Non-EAs usually give because of the pull of their heartstrings, not because of raw data on QALYs. So we as EAs need to do a much better job of using stories and emotions to convey the benefits of Effective Altruism. We should tell stories about the children saved from malaria, of the benefits people gained from GiveDirectly, etc. Then, we should support these stories by numbers and metrics. This will definitely help reduce the image of us as smug, arrogant, and cold-hearted.
Second, we need to be much more intentional—dare I say “rational”—about our communication to non-EAs. We need to develop guidelines for how to communicate to people who are not intuitively rational about their donations. We need to remember that we suffer from a typical mind fallacy, in that most EAs are much more data-driven than the typical person. Moreover, after we got into the EA movement, we forget how weird it looks from the outside—we suffer from the curse of knowledge.
Third, we need to focus much more efforts on developing skills on outreach and communication (this is why I am trying to fill the gap here with my own project). We haven’t done nearly enough research or experimentation on how to grow the movement most effectively through communicating effectively to outsiders. Investing resources in this area would be a very low-hanging fruit with very high returns, I think. If anyone is interested in learning more about my experience here and wants to talk about collaborating, my email is gleb@intentionalinsights.org
I’d add to all this that I’ve experienced some EAs pitching the idea for the first time, and being actively amused at the idea that some people didn’t immediately agree that an evidence-based approach was the best way for them to decide on their career.
I think we don’t lose any of our critique of the way things are by appealing to the way people currently think. A concrete example: the “don’t follow your passion” thing sounds unromantic to most; but if we talk a lot about “meaning”, and how “making a difference” and “being altruistic” tend to make us happier and satisfied with our work, we can win over people through convincing them that we’re simply putting into practice various bits of wisdom that people already tend to take as a given.
Also we probably need to try harder to generally seem emotionally sensitive when talking about why we are EAs: rather than focusing on numbers all the time (which does work for some audiences, of course) we should talk about why we’re altruistic generally, and then it will flow from this that if one cares in a general sense one should care about doing the best thing possible.
This is a really well-thought out piece, and some excellent suggestions here!
I am especially worried about the points about being “cold-hearted,” “rationalist,” and “smug”—I agree that it’s how the movement comes off across to others. This is what I found myself in my project of spreading rational thinking, including about philanthropy and thus Effective Altruism, to a broad audience.
Here’s what I found helpful in my own outreach efforts to non-EAs.
First, to focus much more on speaking to people’s emotions rather than their cognition. Non-EAs usually give because of the pull of their heartstrings, not because of raw data on QALYs. So we as EAs need to do a much better job of using stories and emotions to convey the benefits of Effective Altruism. We should tell stories about the children saved from malaria, of the benefits people gained from GiveDirectly, etc. Then, we should support these stories by numbers and metrics. This will definitely help reduce the image of us as smug, arrogant, and cold-hearted.
Second, we need to be much more intentional—dare I say “rational”—about our communication to non-EAs. We need to develop guidelines for how to communicate to people who are not intuitively rational about their donations. We need to remember that we suffer from a typical mind fallacy, in that most EAs are much more data-driven than the typical person. Moreover, after we got into the EA movement, we forget how weird it looks from the outside—we suffer from the curse of knowledge.
Third, we need to focus much more efforts on developing skills on outreach and communication (this is why I am trying to fill the gap here with my own project). We haven’t done nearly enough research or experimentation on how to grow the movement most effectively through communicating effectively to outsiders. Investing resources in this area would be a very low-hanging fruit with very high returns, I think. If anyone is interested in learning more about my experience here and wants to talk about collaborating, my email is gleb@intentionalinsights.org
Interesting stuff!
I’d add to all this that I’ve experienced some EAs pitching the idea for the first time, and being actively amused at the idea that some people didn’t immediately agree that an evidence-based approach was the best way for them to decide on their career.
I think we don’t lose any of our critique of the way things are by appealing to the way people currently think. A concrete example: the “don’t follow your passion” thing sounds unromantic to most; but if we talk a lot about “meaning”, and how “making a difference” and “being altruistic” tend to make us happier and satisfied with our work, we can win over people through convincing them that we’re simply putting into practice various bits of wisdom that people already tend to take as a given.
Also we probably need to try harder to generally seem emotionally sensitive when talking about why we are EAs: rather than focusing on numbers all the time (which does work for some audiences, of course) we should talk about why we’re altruistic generally, and then it will flow from this that if one cares in a general sense one should care about doing the best thing possible.
I expanded on my ideas here: http://effective-altruism.com/ea/or/overcoming_emotional_resistance_to_effective/
I expanded on these ideas further here: http://effective-altruism.com/ea/or/overcoming_emotional_resistance_to_effective/