The part about being associated with specific influencers could be a major downfall. If someone gains a negative reputation on the internet, will the movement as a whole suffer? Quite possibly.
I’m unsure about whether EA being a low resolution household name would be net good or bad. I wonder how often people don’t give to charity because it’s too much effort to find good organizations. If this is a legitimate problem, having EA in the back of their mind might make it easier to donate without thinking about it. Also, it may simply introduce people to the concept that we can measure the usefulness of charities, and we have a really good idea of which ones are the best.
Selecting for nerdiness and curiosity is great, but I believe EA becoming a household name will attract more nerdy, curious people. I believe there are lots of people who would be involved in EA, but simply don’t know it exists. I don’t think we should expect people to find EA by themselves- part of our job should be to pique their interest.
I follow a lot of internet debaters, and I’m just not seeing that sort of stuff in the EA space. Why? Youtube is a great place for people to hash out ideas, have conversations, and for the audience to get involved. Blogs aren’t as accessible as long form video content.
As for short-form content, it has a lot of downsides. The upside however, is that we can reach a lot of people with a single message, which I believe could have large scale political influence (something I believe EA lacks).
Thanks for writing this post. I recently saw Simone Giertz introducing 80k in one of her videos and liked the result very much. I think one needs to distinguish the different kinds of content to mitigate the risks you described, and I don’t think the goal here has ever been to explain everything EA on TikTok—that is indeed quite unrealistic and dangerous. When it comes to pointing to resources that are freely available and have already been written for a broad audience, though, such as the 80k career guide, using influencers seems like an obvious way to reach more people with negligible downsides. It seems like directing more people toward 1. working on one of the well-researched career paths and/or 2. donating to effective charities has quite some unused potential. Not all of them will (want to) understand the more complex concepts, but that is arguably also not necessary.
The part about being associated with specific influencers could be a major downfall. If someone gains a negative reputation on the internet, will the movement as a whole suffer? Quite possibly.
I’m unsure about whether EA being a low resolution household name would be net good or bad. I wonder how often people don’t give to charity because it’s too much effort to find good organizations. If this is a legitimate problem, having EA in the back of their mind might make it easier to donate without thinking about it. Also, it may simply introduce people to the concept that we can measure the usefulness of charities, and we have a really good idea of which ones are the best.
Selecting for nerdiness and curiosity is great, but I believe EA becoming a household name will attract more nerdy, curious people. I believe there are lots of people who would be involved in EA, but simply don’t know it exists. I don’t think we should expect people to find EA by themselves- part of our job should be to pique their interest.
I follow a lot of internet debaters, and I’m just not seeing that sort of stuff in the EA space. Why? Youtube is a great place for people to hash out ideas, have conversations, and for the audience to get involved. Blogs aren’t as accessible as long form video content.
As for short-form content, it has a lot of downsides. The upside however, is that we can reach a lot of people with a single message, which I believe could have large scale political influence (something I believe EA lacks).
Thanks for writing this post. I recently saw Simone Giertz introducing 80k in one of her videos and liked the result very much. I think one needs to distinguish the different kinds of content to mitigate the risks you described, and I don’t think the goal here has ever been to explain everything EA on TikTok—that is indeed quite unrealistic and dangerous. When it comes to pointing to resources that are freely available and have already been written for a broad audience, though, such as the 80k career guide, using influencers seems like an obvious way to reach more people with negligible downsides. It seems like directing more people toward 1. working on one of the well-researched career paths and/or 2. donating to effective charities has quite some unused potential. Not all of them will (want to) understand the more complex concepts, but that is arguably also not necessary.