I think this is good advise, but advice that people will find hard to accept. Every piece of weird behavior comes packaged with object-level inside view considerations in favor of it, which generate convenient excuses for why we should exempt it from this general argument.
“Yes, of course I agree with this evidence in general, but it doesn’t really apply to me. I don’t need to [wear gender-appropriate clothing / have monogamous relationships / shave my beard / eat normal food / use normal pronouns], because I have really good inside-view reasons for why my weirdness is special.”
I’m as guilty of this as anyone.
Worse, being asked to seem less weird feels like asking people to give up a part of their personality. Especially for the sort of person EA tends to attract, this can seem like a much higher costs than simply donating money. Plus, you don’t get to signal your virtue!
Yes! I actually spent a while looking for that quote while writing the comment, but couldn’t find the source. I recalled the last line as being something like
Are you ready to put on a suit and work a 9 to 5 job for the movement?
but couldn’t get it close enough for my google-fu to bridge the gap to the source.
I heard this too. There is a similar thought expressed from p30-31 of The Animal Activists’ Handbook by Matt Ball (http://animaladvocacybook.com/). Quotes from the two pages:
“After re-evaluating his priorities and choosing a more mainstream appearance, he noticed that the quality of his conversations improved, and the respect of his listeners increased. Consequently, he became more effective an influencer of change” (p30).
“All of us who are working for things that might be seen as going against the status quo should make sure our appearance doesn’t detract from our message. Our message is usually difficult enough for people to accept, without us putting up any additional barriers” (p31).
I found the reference! It might originally have come from another excellent book: Change of Heart by Nick Cooney, in the early part of the book where he talks about self identity (no page reference because I’m looking at an eBook version). This is entirely unimportant, but in this book the words are:
“Are you willing to cut your hair and put on a suit for the environment?”
:)
I think this is good advise, but advice that people will find hard to accept. Every piece of weird behavior comes packaged with object-level inside view considerations in favor of it, which generate convenient excuses for why we should exempt it from this general argument.
I’m as guilty of this as anyone.
Worse, being asked to seem less weird feels like asking people to give up a part of their personality. Especially for the sort of person EA tends to attract, this can seem like a much higher costs than simply donating money. Plus, you don’t get to signal your virtue!
Thanks, this is really insightful.
I remember an anecdote from a vegan activist -- I can’t find the source—that went something like the follows:
Yes! I actually spent a while looking for that quote while writing the comment, but couldn’t find the source. I recalled the last line as being something like
but couldn’t get it close enough for my google-fu to bridge the gap to the source.
I heard this too. There is a similar thought expressed from p30-31 of The Animal Activists’ Handbook by Matt Ball (http://animaladvocacybook.com/). Quotes from the two pages:
I found the reference! It might originally have come from another excellent book: Change of Heart by Nick Cooney, in the early part of the book where he talks about self identity (no page reference because I’m looking at an eBook version). This is entirely unimportant, but in this book the words are: