Too many thoughts all jumbled up, have to try and write more on this but:
Everyone is an emotional thinker, EA’s have some strategies for avoiding worst pitfalls, but still easy and many do fall into them, and we have weaknesses as well which harm our work.
Different strategies needed for between raising profile & funding of highly effective causes and evidence strategies and creating more EA’s—and we can do both.
Some of these ideas sound good, some sound weird and creepy and like we have all the answers and are concerned with manipulating people rather than being engaged in a dialogue where we can learn something valuable as well.
Different approaches may work well/less well for different causes, and approaches that work for one may in doing so harm support for others.
Agreed on many of the points, except the weird and creepy—I’d like to understand more about that. More broadly, my point as I stated in the beginning of the piece was to open up a discussion, not give definitive answers. I’d like to hear many other people’s thoughts on this.
reading again this was the bit i found wierd/creepy - For instance, to address the guilt people experience over their previous giving, to address cached patterns, and help people update their beliefs, it helps to use the CBT tool of reframing by encouraging themselves to distance their current self from their past self, and remember that they did not have this information about EA when they decided on their previous giving, making it ok to choose a new path right now. Another approach I found helpful is to encourage people to think of themselves as being at the ordinary human baseline, and then orient toward improving, rather than seeing oneself as never able to achieve perfect rationality in one’s giving.
But i actually don’t think these ideas are bad i just think the phrasing of them is off. the way you’ve wrtten this makes it seem a bit “oh we are the enlightened ones and here our our clever ways of manipulating you to join us” but i appreciate that is not what you meant—much more about EA as a movement of people who want to “do good better” than criticise people for not thinking same way we do or manipulate guilt.
Too many thoughts all jumbled up, have to try and write more on this but:
Everyone is an emotional thinker, EA’s have some strategies for avoiding worst pitfalls, but still easy and many do fall into them, and we have weaknesses as well which harm our work.
Different strategies needed for between raising profile & funding of highly effective causes and evidence strategies and creating more EA’s—and we can do both.
Some of these ideas sound good, some sound weird and creepy and like we have all the answers and are concerned with manipulating people rather than being engaged in a dialogue where we can learn something valuable as well.
Different approaches may work well/less well for different causes, and approaches that work for one may in doing so harm support for others.
Agreed on many of the points, except the weird and creepy—I’d like to understand more about that. More broadly, my point as I stated in the beginning of the piece was to open up a discussion, not give definitive answers. I’d like to hear many other people’s thoughts on this.
reading again this was the bit i found wierd/creepy - For instance, to address the guilt people experience over their previous giving, to address cached patterns, and help people update their beliefs, it helps to use the CBT tool of reframing by encouraging themselves to distance their current self from their past self, and remember that they did not have this information about EA when they decided on their previous giving, making it ok to choose a new path right now. Another approach I found helpful is to encourage people to think of themselves as being at the ordinary human baseline, and then orient toward improving, rather than seeing oneself as never able to achieve perfect rationality in one’s giving.
But i actually don’t think these ideas are bad i just think the phrasing of them is off. the way you’ve wrtten this makes it seem a bit “oh we are the enlightened ones and here our our clever ways of manipulating you to join us” but i appreciate that is not what you meant—much more about EA as a movement of people who want to “do good better” than criticise people for not thinking same way we do or manipulate guilt.
Thank you for clarifying what I actually meant to convey. I’ll work on phrasing it more effectively in the future.