1A) In my experience, typical people don’t have strong desires to help people far away. They just don’t care about them nearly as much as themselves and their relatives, especially children. It never seems to me when talking with such people that they are confused. It always seems that they just have different values. Actually, their values make more sense from evolutionary psychology POV. So if you ask a person “Being effective at altruism (towards people/animals that might be far away and you won’t necessarily meet) is one of goals in your life, right?” and he disagrees (or agrees to seem good but then doesn’t act on it), IMO most likely that person has different core values, which are usually very hard to change. If I am right, little will be donated by audience you gain by omitting that altruism is your goal. By omitting that you may also fail to attract some people who are interested in altruism and can be targeted more productively.
Not sure if people who e. g. donate to cancer charities because they recently lost their relative to cancer are usually confused. It could also be different values to some degree. IMO that could be a more productive target audience.
1B) If I was a non-EA fan of InIn and after a google search I found a sentence like “it won’t be very beneficial to tell our non-EA audiences that we are trying to promote EA-themed effective giving idea through using emotional engagement and persuasion tactics on them”, I would probably feel angry, manipulated and being treated as someone of a lower intellectual class. Not sure what percentage of people would feel in a similar way. If a journalist found such sentence when writting about InIn, he might see it as an opportunity for initiating a scandal. Stuff like that can never happen when you always say/write everything you are thinking that is important enough to be said: no lies, no “Not Technically Lying”, no omissions. Just always trying to make maps in other brains closer to what you think is reality. This is what I call honesty. Spreading EA ideas seems like an admirable goal to many people so to me it’s strange that you chose to hide that.
1B) This leads to the second point. Speaking to people’s emotions and using stories is not lying, even technically :-) Helping people learn more about their own values is what’s at stake. I accept that you have a belief that spreading EA ideas seems like an admirable goal to many people, but it’s not an admirable goal to people who don’t know about EA. So we need to be strategic in how we speak to them.
Anyway, I don’t think a further continuation of this conversation is productive. I have had these conversations with many folks on this forum, you can read my past posts. We may have different perspectives on the best way to approach the same goals, so let’s just focus on our broader shared values, and leave each of us to do the best we can to advance human flourishing.
1A) In my experience, typical people don’t have strong desires to help people far away. They just don’t care about them nearly as much as themselves and their relatives, especially children. It never seems to me when talking with such people that they are confused. It always seems that they just have different values. Actually, their values make more sense from evolutionary psychology POV. So if you ask a person “Being effective at altruism (towards people/animals that might be far away and you won’t necessarily meet) is one of goals in your life, right?” and he disagrees (or agrees to seem good but then doesn’t act on it), IMO most likely that person has different core values, which are usually very hard to change. If I am right, little will be donated by audience you gain by omitting that altruism is your goal. By omitting that you may also fail to attract some people who are interested in altruism and can be targeted more productively.
Not sure if people who e. g. donate to cancer charities because they recently lost their relative to cancer are usually confused. It could also be different values to some degree. IMO that could be a more productive target audience.
1B) If I was a non-EA fan of InIn and after a google search I found a sentence like “it won’t be very beneficial to tell our non-EA audiences that we are trying to promote EA-themed effective giving idea through using emotional engagement and persuasion tactics on them”, I would probably feel angry, manipulated and being treated as someone of a lower intellectual class. Not sure what percentage of people would feel in a similar way. If a journalist found such sentence when writting about InIn, he might see it as an opportunity for initiating a scandal. Stuff like that can never happen when you always say/write everything you are thinking that is important enough to be said: no lies, no “Not Technically Lying”, no omissions. Just always trying to make maps in other brains closer to what you think is reality. This is what I call honesty. Spreading EA ideas seems like an admirable goal to many people so to me it’s strange that you chose to hide that.
1A) The example of Giving Games seems to confound your hypothesis, and I am convinced by it: http://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/Blog/ID/196/Can-Giving-Games-change-donor-behavior-We-did-an-experiment-to-find-out Essentially, Giving Games help people realize their own values, through putting them before a real choice, one that is emotionally engaging and forces them to think through the situation.
1B) This leads to the second point. Speaking to people’s emotions and using stories is not lying, even technically :-) Helping people learn more about their own values is what’s at stake. I accept that you have a belief that spreading EA ideas seems like an admirable goal to many people, but it’s not an admirable goal to people who don’t know about EA. So we need to be strategic in how we speak to them.
Anyway, I don’t think a further continuation of this conversation is productive. I have had these conversations with many folks on this forum, you can read my past posts. We may have different perspectives on the best way to approach the same goals, so let’s just focus on our broader shared values, and leave each of us to do the best we can to advance human flourishing.
Just noticed that almost the same thoughts regarding 1A) were said in http://effective-altruism.com/ea/rr/the_big_problem_with_how_we_do_outreach/ You don’t have to answer any of this if it’s not new.