I think that EA outreach can be net positive in a lot of circumstances, but there is one version of it that always makes me cringe. That version is the targeting of really young people (for this quicktake, I will say anyone under 20). This would basically include any high school targeting and most early-stage college targeting. I think I do not like it for two reasons: 1) it feels a bit like targeting the young/naive in a way I wish we would not have to do, given the quality of our ideas, and 2) these folks are typically far from making a real impact, and there is lots of time for them to lose interest or get lost along the way.
Interestingly, this stands in contrast to my personal experience—I found EA when I was in my early 20s and would have benefited significantly from hearing about it in my teenage years.
Eh, I’m with Aristotle on this one: it’s better to start early with moral education. If anything, I think EA leaves it too late. We should be thinking about how to encourage the virtues of scope-sensitive beneficentrism (obviously not using those terms!) starting in early childhood.
(Or, rather, since most actual EAs aren’t qualified to do this, we should hope to win over some early childhood educators who would be competent to do this!)
Are you imagining this being taught to children in a philosophy class along topics like virtue ethics etc, or do you think that “scope-sensitive beneficententrism” should be taught just as students are taught the golden rule and not to bully one another?
I think there could be ways of doing both. But yeah, I think the core idea of “it’s good to actively help people, and helping more is better than helping less” should be a core component of civic virtue that’s taught as plain commonsense wisdom alongside “racism is bad”, etc.
I think you raise some good points. Two potential countervailing considerations:
19 year olds are legally adults—they can (varying a bit by country) vote, drink, buy firearms, join the army, get married, raise children.
It’s also common for other ideological movements to target much younger people. For example, both environmentalism and feminism are taught in elementary schools.
Can you maybe expand a bit more on why? I found out about EA when I was 23 and I wish I found out about it when I was perhaps 16⁄17 and perhaps earlier. It’s obviously hard to know but I think I would have made better and different choices on career path, study, etc.; so it’s advantageous to learn about EA earlier in life despite being far from making direct impact.
I also suspect though correct me if I’m wrong, behind point 1 is an assumption that EA is bad for people’s personal welfare. I don’t know if this is true.
You highlight a couple of downsides. Far from all of the downsides of course, but none of the advantages either.
I feel a bit sad to read this since I’ve worked on something related[1] to what you post about for years myself. And a bit confused why you posted this; do you think that you think EAs are underrating these two downsides? (If not, it just feels a bit unnecessarily disparaging to people trying their best to do good in the world.)
Appreciate you highlighting your personal experience though; that’s a useful anecdote.
“Targeting of really young people” is certainly not the framing I would use; there’s genuine demand for the services that we offer, as demonstrated by the tens of thousands of applications received across Leaf, Non-Trivial, Atlas, Pivotal, and SPARC/ESPR. But it’s of course accurate in the sense that our target audience consists of (subsets of) young people.
Hey Jamie, sorry my post made you feel bad. Indeed there are more nuances and it would be interesting to compile a more advanced pros and cons list on the topic of targeting younger folks. When AIM/me have thought about the pros and cons in deeper depth we tend to come out negative on it—specifically I do indeed think both value drift and flow through ecosystem effects to other parts of the movement are on average under-valubed by EAs. I wanted to call some attention to these two cons.
I think the possibility that outreach to younger age groups[1] might be net negative is relatively neglected. That said, the two possible reasons suggested here didn’t strike me as particularly conclusive.
The main reasons why I’m somewhat wary of outreach to younger ages (though there are certainly many considerations on both sides):
It seems quite plausible that people are less apt to adopt EA at younger ages because their thinking is ‘less developed’ in some relevant way that seems associated with interest in EA.
I think something related to but distinct from your factor (2) could also be an influence here, namely reaching out to people close to the time when they are making relevant decisions might be more effective at engaging people.
It also seems possible (though far from certain) that the counterfactual for many people engaged by outreach to younger age groups, is that they could have been reached by outreach targeted at a later date, i.e. many people we reach as high schoolers could simply have been reached once they were at university.
These questions seem very uncertain, but also empirically tractable, so it’s a shame that more hasn’t been done to try to address them. For example, it seems relatively straightforward to compare the success rates of outreach targeting different ages.
We previously did a little work to look at the relationship between the age when people first got involved in EA and their level of engagement. Prima facie, younger age of involvement seemed associated with higher engagement, though there’s a relative dearth of people who joined EA at younger ages, making the estimates uncertain (when comparing <20s to early 20s, for example), and we’d need to spend more time on it to disentangle other possible confounds.
Or it might be that ‘life stages’ are the relevant factor rather than age per se, i.e. a younger person who’s already an undergrad might have similar outcomes when exposed to EA as a typical-age undergrad, whereas reaching out to people while in high school (regardless of age) might be associated with negative outcomes.
Do you think there’s a difference between developmentally and otherwise appropriate engagement focused on younger people and problematic targeting? Your statement that the cringe-inducing activities would basically include “most early-stage college targeting” along with “any” targeting at the high school level implies that there may be some difference at the young adult level in your mind, but maybe not at the not-quite-adult level.
My usual approach on these sorts of questions is to broaden the question to include what kinds of stuff I would think appropriate for analogous altruistic/charitable movements, and then decide whether EA has any special features that justify a deviation from that baseline. If I deploy that approach, my baseline would be (e.g.) that there are certainly things that are inappropriate for under-20s but that one could easily extend a norm too broadly. Obviously, the younger the age in question, the less that would be appropriate—but I don’t think I’m left with a categorical bar for engagement directed at under-18s.
(Whether investing resources in under-20s is a strategically wise use of resources is a different question to me, but does not bring up feelings of cringe for me.)
I think a semi-decent amount of broadly targeted adult-based outreach would have resulted in me finding out about EA (e.g., I watched a lot of TED Talks and likely would have found out about EA if it had TED Talks at that point). I also think mediums that are not focused on a given age but also do not penalize someone for it would have been effective. For example, when I was young, I took part in a lot of forums in part because they didn’t care about or know my age.
I think that EA outreach can be net positive in a lot of circumstances, but there is one version of it that always makes me cringe. That version is the targeting of really young people (for this quicktake, I will say anyone under 20). This would basically include any high school targeting and most early-stage college targeting. I think I do not like it for two reasons: 1) it feels a bit like targeting the young/naive in a way I wish we would not have to do, given the quality of our ideas, and 2) these folks are typically far from making a real impact, and there is lots of time for them to lose interest or get lost along the way.
Interestingly, this stands in contrast to my personal experience—I found EA when I was in my early 20s and would have benefited significantly from hearing about it in my teenage years.
Eh, I’m with Aristotle on this one: it’s better to start early with moral education. If anything, I think EA leaves it too late. We should be thinking about how to encourage the virtues of scope-sensitive beneficentrism (obviously not using those terms!) starting in early childhood.
(Or, rather, since most actual EAs aren’t qualified to do this, we should hope to win over some early childhood educators who would be competent to do this!)
Are you imagining this being taught to children in a philosophy class along topics like virtue ethics etc, or do you think that “scope-sensitive beneficententrism” should be taught just as students are taught the golden rule and not to bully one another?
I think there could be ways of doing both. But yeah, I think the core idea of “it’s good to actively help people, and helping more is better than helping less” should be a core component of civic virtue that’s taught as plain commonsense wisdom alongside “racism is bad”, etc.
I think you raise some good points. Two potential countervailing considerations:
19 year olds are legally adults—they can (varying a bit by country) vote, drink, buy firearms, join the army, get married, raise children.
It’s also common for other ideological movements to target much younger people. For example, both environmentalism and feminism are taught in elementary schools.
Can you maybe expand a bit more on why? I found out about EA when I was 23 and I wish I found out about it when I was perhaps 16⁄17 and perhaps earlier. It’s obviously hard to know but I think I would have made better and different choices on career path, study, etc.; so it’s advantageous to learn about EA earlier in life despite being far from making direct impact.
I also suspect though correct me if I’m wrong, behind point 1 is an assumption that EA is bad for people’s personal welfare. I don’t know if this is true.
You highlight a couple of downsides. Far from all of the downsides of course, but none of the advantages either.
I feel a bit sad to read this since I’ve worked on something related[1] to what you post about for years myself. And a bit confused why you posted this; do you think that you think EAs are underrating these two downsides? (If not, it just feels a bit unnecessarily disparaging to people trying their best to do good in the world.)
Appreciate you highlighting your personal experience though; that’s a useful anecdote.
“Targeting of really young people” is certainly not the framing I would use; there’s genuine demand for the services that we offer, as demonstrated by the tens of thousands of applications received across Leaf, Non-Trivial, Atlas, Pivotal, and SPARC/ESPR. But it’s of course accurate in the sense that our target audience consists of (subsets of) young people.
Hey Jamie, sorry my post made you feel bad. Indeed there are more nuances and it would be interesting to compile a more advanced pros and cons list on the topic of targeting younger folks. When AIM/me have thought about the pros and cons in deeper depth we tend to come out negative on it—specifically I do indeed think both value drift and flow through ecosystem effects to other parts of the movement are on average under-valubed by EAs. I wanted to call some attention to these two cons.
I think the possibility that outreach to younger age groups[1] might be net negative is relatively neglected. That said, the two possible reasons suggested here didn’t strike me as particularly conclusive.
The main reasons why I’m somewhat wary of outreach to younger ages (though there are certainly many considerations on both sides):
It seems quite plausible that people are less apt to adopt EA at younger ages because their thinking is ‘less developed’ in some relevant way that seems associated with interest in EA.
I think something related to but distinct from your factor (2) could also be an influence here, namely reaching out to people close to the time when they are making relevant decisions might be more effective at engaging people.
It also seems possible (though far from certain) that the counterfactual for many people engaged by outreach to younger age groups, is that they could have been reached by outreach targeted at a later date, i.e. many people we reach as high schoolers could simply have been reached once they were at university.
These questions seem very uncertain, but also empirically tractable, so it’s a shame that more hasn’t been done to try to address them. For example, it seems relatively straightforward to compare the success rates of outreach targeting different ages.
We previously did a little work to look at the relationship between the age when people first got involved in EA and their level of engagement. Prima facie, younger age of involvement seemed associated with higher engagement, though there’s a relative dearth of people who joined EA at younger ages, making the estimates uncertain (when comparing <20s to early 20s, for example), and we’d need to spend more time on it to disentangle other possible confounds.
Or it might be that ‘life stages’ are the relevant factor rather than age per se, i.e. a younger person who’s already an undergrad might have similar outcomes when exposed to EA as a typical-age undergrad, whereas reaching out to people while in high school (regardless of age) might be associated with negative outcomes.
Do you think there’s a difference between developmentally and otherwise appropriate engagement focused on younger people and problematic targeting? Your statement that the cringe-inducing activities would basically include “most early-stage college targeting” along with “any” targeting at the high school level implies that there may be some difference at the young adult level in your mind, but maybe not at the not-quite-adult level.
My usual approach on these sorts of questions is to broaden the question to include what kinds of stuff I would think appropriate for analogous altruistic/charitable movements, and then decide whether EA has any special features that justify a deviation from that baseline. If I deploy that approach, my baseline would be (e.g.) that there are certainly things that are inappropriate for under-20s but that one could easily extend a norm too broadly. Obviously, the younger the age in question, the less that would be appropriate—but I don’t think I’m left with a categorical bar for engagement directed at under-18s.
(Whether investing resources in under-20s is a strategically wise use of resources is a different question to me, but does not bring up feelings of cringe for me.)
Do you think there’s a way to tell the former group apart from people who are closer to your experience (hearing earlier would be beneficial)?
I think a semi-decent amount of broadly targeted adult-based outreach would have resulted in me finding out about EA (e.g., I watched a lot of TED Talks and likely would have found out about EA if it had TED Talks at that point). I also think mediums that are not focused on a given age but also do not penalize someone for it would have been effective. For example, when I was young, I took part in a lot of forums in part because they didn’t care about or know my age.