My main point: By not putting “EA” into the name of your project, you get free option value: If you do great, you can still always associate with EA more strongly at a later stage; if you do poorly, you have avoided causing any problems for EA.
I’ve already done this. I have shared much of this content for over a year without having this name and website. My impression was that it didn’t do great nor did it do poorly (except among EAs, who have been mostly positive). One of the problems was that some people seemed confused and suspicious because they didn’t grasp who I was and what point of view I was coming from.
I agree with this. As far as I know, none of these orgs and individuals currently use an EA branding.
A few do. And most may not literally have “EA” in their name, but they still explicitly invoke it, and audiences are smart enough to know that they are associated with the EA movement.
And they get far larger audiences and attention than me, so they are the dominant images in the minds of people who have political perceptions of EA. Whatever I do to invoke EA will create a more equal diversity of public political faces of the movement, not a monolithic association of the EA brand with my particular view.
RE: the rest of your points, I won’t go point by point because you are making some general arguments which don’t necessarily apply to your specific worry about the presence or absence of “EA” in the name. It would be more fruitful to first clarify exactly which types of people are going to have different perceptions on this basis. Then after that we can talk about whether the differences in perception for those particular people will be good or bad.
You already say that you are mainly worried about “public intellectuals, policy professionals, and politicians.” Any of these who reads my website in detail or understands the EA movement well will know that it relates to EA without necessarily being the only EA view. So we are imagining a political elite who knows little about EA and looks briefly at my website. A lot of the general arguments don’t apply here, and to me it seems like a good idea to (a) give this person a hook to take the content seriously and (b) show this person that EA can be relevant to their own line of work.
Or maybe we are imagining someone who previously didn’t know about EA at all, in which case introducing them to the idea is a good thing.
I’ve already done this. I have shared much of this content for over a year without having this name and website. My impression was that it didn’t do great nor did it do poorly (except among EAs, who have been mostly positive). One of the problems was that some people seemed confused and suspicious because they didn’t grasp who I was and what point of view I was coming from.
A few do. And most may not literally have “EA” in their name, but they still explicitly invoke it, and audiences are smart enough to know that they are associated with the EA movement.
And they get far larger audiences and attention than me, so they are the dominant images in the minds of people who have political perceptions of EA. Whatever I do to invoke EA will create a more equal diversity of public political faces of the movement, not a monolithic association of the EA brand with my particular view.
RE: the rest of your points, I won’t go point by point because you are making some general arguments which don’t necessarily apply to your specific worry about the presence or absence of “EA” in the name. It would be more fruitful to first clarify exactly which types of people are going to have different perceptions on this basis. Then after that we can talk about whether the differences in perception for those particular people will be good or bad.
You already say that you are mainly worried about “public intellectuals, policy professionals, and politicians.” Any of these who reads my website in detail or understands the EA movement well will know that it relates to EA without necessarily being the only EA view. So we are imagining a political elite who knows little about EA and looks briefly at my website. A lot of the general arguments don’t apply here, and to me it seems like a good idea to (a) give this person a hook to take the content seriously and (b) show this person that EA can be relevant to their own line of work.
Or maybe we are imagining someone who previously didn’t know about EA at all, in which case introducing them to the idea is a good thing.