Meh, I really don’t like the tonality of the essay.
I think that if an average person with money tried to read it, it would not convert them to donating more to effective charities. Quite the opposite, it would put them off donating altogether.
What I think is good:
admitting that the warm feeling people get from helping others is alright and important;
the idea of segmenting do-good instruments by the result they achieve: one for the warm feeling, another for prestige, a third for the actual impact.
However, I don’t believe it is the donor’s responsibility to understand this. This kind of self-reflection and dissection of one’s inner workings requires a lot of effort, and we simply can’t require it from everyone. This analytical, self-reflective approach could put a person off donating altogether: after spending some time thinking analytically about charity, whom to give and whom not etc., people lower their giving to everyone (Small, Loewenstein & Slovic 2007).
I believe the work of making EA appealing, sexy, and prestigious to the masses and to the few rich people is the responsibility of the organizers and ambassadors of the movement. So, using the terminology of the essay, I am pro “warm feeling” at the door and impact as the product of attracting people to that warm feeling.
A naive example: making Taylor Swift, Ronaldo, or some media influencer an ambassador of the EA movement and attracting some of their followers who come just for the warm fuzzies is, in my opinion, smart and good long-term. The MrBeast partnership with GiveDirectly is close to what I propose.
The closest counterpoint to my approach I found is the fidelity model. The basic idea, as I understand it: when you start appealing to a mass audience, you lose nuances that are important for understanding the idea, and the distortion can go so far that the idea stops working on the cause.
My take: this is real, this is a risk, but it doesn’t mean you should not do it at all. Distortion happens anyway — look at how EA is now deeply associated with Anthropic and doomsday scenarios amid the AI hype. What could the general audience get from it? Those people are a little bit crazy, they try to scare us, and they write hellishly long essays that are tiresome to read..
The bigger problem is that almost no one knows about EA — genuine awareness in the US is around 1–2%. So, for me, the only logical way to scale the impact is to raise awareness and make EA more appealing. It’s better to try to control the narrative and get better at it than to avoid it altogether.
My speculation: a movement born in academia, led by PhDs and intellectuals, may simply be uncomfortable with people who don’t read long texts and who distort complex arguments. But those people are most of the world, and they always will be.
So what?
I would be really interested to hear opposing thoughts and the theory of change behind making donors more rational about how they think about doing good.
I would love to explore ideas in both directions:
how to make EA sexier and more appealing to the rich and the masses
and why it is a bad idea, and why the traditional way of educating people through essays, lectures, and books is better.
Meh, I really don’t like the tonality of the essay.
I think that if an average person with money tried to read it, it would not convert them to donating more to effective charities. Quite the opposite, it would put them off donating altogether.
What I think is good:
admitting that the warm feeling people get from helping others is alright and important;
the idea of segmenting do-good instruments by the result they achieve: one for the warm feeling, another for prestige, a third for the actual impact.
However, I don’t believe it is the donor’s responsibility to understand this. This kind of self-reflection and dissection of one’s inner workings requires a lot of effort, and we simply can’t require it from everyone. This analytical, self-reflective approach could put a person off donating altogether: after spending some time thinking analytically about charity, whom to give and whom not etc., people lower their giving to everyone (Small, Loewenstein & Slovic 2007).
I believe the work of making EA appealing, sexy, and prestigious to the masses and to the few rich people is the responsibility of the organizers and ambassadors of the movement. So, using the terminology of the essay, I am pro “warm feeling” at the door and impact as the product of attracting people to that warm feeling.
A naive example: making Taylor Swift, Ronaldo, or some media influencer an ambassador of the EA movement and attracting some of their followers who come just for the warm fuzzies is, in my opinion, smart and good long-term. The MrBeast partnership with GiveDirectly is close to what I propose.
The closest counterpoint to my approach I found is the fidelity model. The basic idea, as I understand it: when you start appealing to a mass audience, you lose nuances that are important for understanding the idea, and the distortion can go so far that the idea stops working on the cause.
My take: this is real, this is a risk, but it doesn’t mean you should not do it at all.
Distortion happens anyway — look at how EA is now deeply associated with Anthropic and doomsday scenarios amid the AI hype. What could the general audience get from it? Those people are a little bit crazy, they try to scare us, and they write hellishly long essays that are tiresome to read..
The bigger problem is that almost no one knows about EA — genuine awareness in the US is around 1–2%. So, for me, the only logical way to scale the impact is to raise awareness and make EA more appealing. It’s better to try to control the narrative and get better at it than to avoid it altogether.
My speculation: a movement born in academia, led by PhDs and intellectuals, may simply be uncomfortable with people who don’t read long texts and who distort complex arguments. But those people are most of the world, and they always will be.
So what?
I would be really interested to hear opposing thoughts and the theory of change behind making donors more rational about how they think about doing good.
I would love to explore ideas in both directions:
how to make EA sexier and more appealing to the rich and the masses
and why it is a bad idea, and why the traditional way of educating people through essays, lectures, and books is better.