I see you mention that HIA’s recommendations are based on a suffering-focused perspective. It’s great that you’re clear about where you’re coming from/what you’re optimising for. To explore the ethical perspective of HIA further—what is HIA’s position on longtermism?
(I’m not saying you should mention your take on longtermism on the website.)
We all have different beliefs and intuitions about the world, including about how other people see the world.
Compared to the rest of us, Marcus has a strong comparative advantage in both a) having an intuition for what messages work for professional athletes and would be easier for them to relate to, and more importantly, b) access to a network to test different messages.
I would personally be excited if, rather than for us to debate at length of what will or won’t be appealing for a hypothetical audience, for Marcus to just go out and experiment with different messages with the actual audience that he has.
People tend to inside-view slightly too hard, so I’d expect the experience of the FP/GWWC team working with high net worth people, and TLYCS working with celebrities, to be extremely valuable even if none of the HNW/celebs are sportspeople.
Also, at least some of the potential massive impact of HIA (and one of the reasons I’m most excited about it) is the huge platform Athletes have. That means that there wre two considerations when messaging to athletes: what message is most appealing to them, and what message is most appealing to a general audience once relayed by them. I would not be surprised if the best course of action was one which got slightly fewer athletes on board, but those athletes felt able to articulate a clear, positive message, which got a wider audience very excited about effective giving.
I agree that debating on the EAF with randoms like us isn’t a productive way of Marcus fine-tuning his messaging (even if we might be able to make some forecasts), but I’m excited to see that there’s some sort of collaboration with TLYCS, and I think talking to them, REG, GWWC, and FP would be a much better path than experimenting alone.
Threading etiquette is confusing! It was unclear to me whether the right person to respond to was Ben, Marcus, or you. So I went for the most top-level comment that seemed reasonable.
In retrospect I should have just commented on the post directly.
See below about casting the net—being an athlete myself and knowing many personally I think longtermism is too much of a stretch conceptually for most athletes at this point.
I think if you focus on climate change and pandemics, it can actually seem really mainstream (especially now!).
Just don’t mention AI :)
I think it would be really cool if you added a section on ‘catastrophic risks’ and used the recommended charities from Founder’s Pledge – they have examples in pandemic prevention and climate risks—at least as an experiment.
I see you mention that HIA’s recommendations are based on a suffering-focused perspective. It’s great that you’re clear about where you’re coming from/what you’re optimising for. To explore the ethical perspective of HIA further—what is HIA’s position on longtermism?
(I’m not saying you should mention your take on longtermism on the website.)
We all have different beliefs and intuitions about the world, including about how other people see the world.
Compared to the rest of us, Marcus has a strong comparative advantage in both a) having an intuition for what messages work for professional athletes and would be easier for them to relate to, and more importantly, b) access to a network to test different messages.
I would personally be excited if, rather than for us to debate at length of what will or won’t be appealing for a hypothetical audience, for Marcus to just go out and experiment with different messages with the actual audience that he has.
The results may or may not surprise us.
Counterpoint:
People tend to inside-view slightly too hard, so I’d expect the experience of the FP/GWWC team working with high net worth people, and TLYCS working with celebrities, to be extremely valuable even if none of the HNW/celebs are sportspeople.
Also, at least some of the potential massive impact of HIA (and one of the reasons I’m most excited about it) is the huge platform Athletes have. That means that there wre two considerations when messaging to athletes: what message is most appealing to them, and what message is most appealing to a general audience once relayed by them. I would not be surprised if the best course of action was one which got slightly fewer athletes on board, but those athletes felt able to articulate a clear, positive message, which got a wider audience very excited about effective giving.
I agree that debating on the EAF with randoms like us isn’t a productive way of Marcus fine-tuning his messaging (even if we might be able to make some forecasts), but I’m excited to see that there’s some sort of collaboration with TLYCS, and I think talking to them, REG, GWWC, and FP would be a much better path than experimenting alone.
Was this meant as a reply to my comment or a reply to Ben’s comment?
I was just asking what the position was and made explicit I wasn’t suggesting Marcus change the website.
Threading etiquette is confusing! It was unclear to me whether the right person to respond to was Ben, Marcus, or you. So I went for the most top-level comment that seemed reasonable.
In retrospect I should have just commented on the post directly.
See below about casting the net—being an athlete myself and knowing many personally I think longtermism is too much of a stretch conceptually for most athletes at this point.
I think if you focus on climate change and pandemics, it can actually seem really mainstream (especially now!).
Just don’t mention AI :)
I think it would be really cool if you added a section on ‘catastrophic risks’ and used the recommended charities from Founder’s Pledge – they have examples in pandemic prevention and climate risks—at least as an experiment.