I don’t think that evidence from pitches of luxury cars necessarily is very relevant for us. Experiences from other social and political movements seem much more relevant. As far as I know most if not all of them used the tactics of getting as much attention as possible. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily show that they used the right tactics, but on the reasonable hypothesis that they are on average better than chance at choosing good tactics, it does provide some evidence that attention-seeking is a good tactics.
I don’t have any rigorous evidence on this matter, but my personal experience is certainly not that people who hear about EA somehow turn against it. I would need much more compelling evidence than is presented in this post to stop believing that.
Yes, we do need to collect more information about what works, but we should definitely not “hit the brakes”. Instead, we need to double our efforts to reach out. E.g., in my country, Sweden, very few have even heard of EA still, but when they do, most of them like it.
We’re at a too early stage for evaluating that. I’m just saying there seems to be something in between a “win” in the sense of immediate conversion, and a “loss” in the sense that the person is now less likely to join the EA movement. Therefore, I find these words unwarranted:
Every exposure that isn’t a win is indeed a loss.
Josh continues:
I believe EA organizations and individuals should immediately & drastically stop being so attention seeking, realize the danger of what we’re doing, and focus much more on being experimental, measuring our results, and optimizing for conversion in every single form of outreach that we do. Only once we’re measuring and unable to improve on our conversion rates should we go back to our awareness-building, attention-seeking strategies.
I also think this strategy is hard to get to work from an organizational point of view. Today, people are working enthusiastically to grow the movement in a highly decentralized way. This strategy would need much more centralized planning, and it’s not clear to me how we would pull that off. Also, there is a risk that the grass-roots would lose a bit of their entusiasm if they had to co-ordinate all of their outreach activities with someone measuring their activities.
I don’t think that evidence from pitches of luxury cars necessarily is very relevant for us. Experiences from other social and political movements seem much more relevant. As far as I know most if not all of them used the tactics of getting as much attention as possible. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily show that they used the right tactics, but on the reasonable hypothesis that they are on average better than chance at choosing good tactics, it does provide some evidence that attention-seeking is a good tactics.
I don’t have any rigorous evidence on this matter, but my personal experience is certainly not that people who hear about EA somehow turn against it. I would need much more compelling evidence than is presented in this post to stop believing that.
Yes, we do need to collect more information about what works, but we should definitely not “hit the brakes”. Instead, we need to double our efforts to reach out. E.g., in my country, Sweden, very few have even heard of EA still, but when they do, most of them like it.
That’s interesting—what’s your best guess or evidence as to how many change their actions as a result, and in what ways they do so?
We’re at a too early stage for evaluating that. I’m just saying there seems to be something in between a “win” in the sense of immediate conversion, and a “loss” in the sense that the person is now less likely to join the EA movement. Therefore, I find these words unwarranted:
Josh continues:
I also think this strategy is hard to get to work from an organizational point of view. Today, people are working enthusiastically to grow the movement in a highly decentralized way. This strategy would need much more centralized planning, and it’s not clear to me how we would pull that off. Also, there is a risk that the grass-roots would lose a bit of their entusiasm if they had to co-ordinate all of their outreach activities with someone measuring their activities.