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I suspect that straightforwardly taking specific EA ideas and putting them into fiction is going to be very hard to do in a non-cringeworthy way (as pointed out by elle in another comment). I’d be more interested in attempts to write fiction that conveys an EA mindset without being overly conceptual.

For instance, a lot of today’s fiction seems cynical and pessimistic about human nature; the characters frequently don’t seem to have goals related to anything other than their immediate social environment; and they often don’t pursue those goals effectively (apparently for the sake of dramatic tension). Fiction demonstrating people working effectively on ambitious, broadly beneficial goals, perhaps with dramatic tension caused by something other than humans being terrible to each other, could help propagate EA mindset.

I like your encouragement to create more art. However, I noticed cringing at some of your ideas in the appendix. I worry that they would end up being “poorly executed cultural artefacts [that] may put EA into disrepute” as you put it.

I do not feel capable of explaining exactly where the cringe reaction is coming from, but a few examples:

I do not like the idea in Beautopia of equating physical appearance with moral goodness, given that a) it is already an issue that people assume positive personality traits when they see physically attractive people and b) it assumes there is some objective and real “good” that can be calculated. And the final plot line implying that it is good to kill people we think are evil seems like a bad meme to spread.

Dead baby currency seems overly simplistic and insensitive, although I am having a hard time putting words to why. It also triggers scrupulosity concerns (for example, see http://​​www.givinggladly.com/​​2012/​​03/​​tradeoffs.html ).

Finally, I am wary of how you refer to “Africa” monolithically. For more, see https://​​www.theatlantic.com/​​international/​​archive/​​2013/​​08/​​confusing-country-continent-how-we-talk-about-africa/​​311621/​​.

There is so much art already in the world that remixes and reinterpretations seem like the most promising sources of “EA art”. For example, I got into effective altruism largely due to the influence of the film Life in a Day, which has nothing to do with EA but is very good at cultivating the notion that every person’s life has value, no matter where they live—it makes everyone seem equally “real”.

I’ve shown this movie to multiple EA groups after speaking about its influence on me, and it seems like people are often able to view it through the lens I’ve suggested, taking away the same message I did (if not with the same level of intensity).

Other examples (besides Schindler’s List, which is probably the clearest one I’ve seen):

• This essay on Dorothea Brooke, a fictional character who first appeared in 1871 but still pursued the same goals as the EA movement.

• This document, which contains a few different examples, including writeups from me on the films Eye in the Sky and The Act of Killing.

• The book Stargirl (by Jerry Spinelli), which contains this quote.

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Regarding your examples: I find most of these unappealing, either because they are viscerally unpleasant (“dead baby currency”) or far too didactic (power-ups based on charity effectiveness). Few of the world’s most successful stories were created to teach someone a lesson; instead, the lesson “rides along” with the story. If we follow a good system of ethics, telling stories about the world should naturally carry an ethical message.

(Harry Potter isn’t about loyalty or courage; it’s about children trying to do the right thing, which naturally requires loyalty and courage as a side effect. HPMOR is about rationality, but still places the character in a world where rationality is naturally useful, not a world where making rational decisions makes you look more handsome. Ethical actions are good in the same way rational actions are useful; a story about ethics can be a story about people doing good for its own sake.)

I liked the first part of the scope-sensitive ethics story the most; it relies on real-world events and real cognitive biases. I don’t think “genetic engineering” is necessary if we focus on the struggle of an empathetic person to navigate an awful world; by understanding her mind, we may naturally move closer to EA.

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An example of a story you could write about EA without being too didactic or visceral:

A new kid shows up at school. It’s an ordinary school, and students are cruel to each other in ordinary ways (but realistic—teasing and gossip and an occasional shove, not fistfights that would result in expulsion from any actual public school).

The kid comes from a homeschool-ish background where she learned in a small, tightly-knit group of children who liked and supported each other. She views the state of the school as horrible. She decides she’s going to fix it by helping her classmates to cooperate and focus on problems that aren’t nearly as petty. She assembles a motley crew of altruistic allies from the school’s various cliques, and together they bring about relative harmony.

There are many directions in which one could take the story from there:

• The kids could try to reform the school board, learning about how to fix broken systems in the process.

• They could research the best education/​public policy reforms in the world and try to reform the city in that direction.

• If you want to be a bit more explicit, they could get involved in charity and start a high-school EA group (perhaps under a different name), occasionally hanging out with visitors from the EA world (like Bob Riblin, who offers career advice, or journalist Kelsie Pyle, who wants to learn how this particular town became so… effective). It’s best if they do this after realizing how hard it is to make incremental progress on entrenched social issues—after all, that’s how plenty of people actually become interested in EA.

The key is that you need to show people using an EA mindset (thinking about consequences and counterfactuals, remembering that everyone is valuable), even if they aren’t working on EA causes. Show people characters who do incredible things and invite them to contemplate the virtues of those characters, and you don’t need to hammer too hard on the philosophy.

Have you heard of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (http://​www.hpmor.com/​) and/​or http://​​unsongbook.com ? I think they serve some of this role for the community already.

It’s interesting they are both long-form web fiction; we don’t have EA tv shows or rock bands that I know of.

Can we come up with a list of existing pieces of art that come close to this? I don’t expect good ideas to come from first principles, but there might be some type of art out there that is non-cringy and conveys elements of EA thinking properly.

I’ll start with Schindler’s list, and especially this scene, where the protagonist breaks down while calculating just how many more lives he could have saved if he had sold his car, his jewelry, etc.

I am not an artist, but it seems like visual art could illustrate scope insensitivity and neglectedness. For instance, represent a relatively small amount of current lives and a huge amount of money going towards them, and then a huge number of future lives in a very small amount of money going towards them. Similarly with pets versus livestock (like ACE’s graphs posted about recently on the forum). Poverty would be a little more difficult, but maybe one could use the number of people in developed countries making under $10 a day and the amount of money that flows towards them, versus the number of people in less-developed countries making under $10 a day and the amount of money that flows towards them.

Thank you for posting this. I massively laud giving slightly ‘left field’ approaches a go, and I think you’ve raised an important issue about communicating about EA movement and thinking generally.

My reply rests on a few some assumptions, which I hope are not too unfair—happy for critique /​ challenge on them.

The OP’s point about art is worth considering in the context of another question: how can we communicate our thinking (in all its diversity and complexity) accurately and effectively to people outside the community?

Whilst I laud the OP’s ambition, it’s worth thinking about the intermediate steps between logical reasoning (which I observe is our default) and art; using metaphor and analogy to illustrate points. (To note: I believe some animal charities do this already, using the Schindler’s car example to influence actions regarding factory farming.)
Before giving arguments in favour, here’s an example: video explaining a new type of cancer treatment, CAR-T cell therapy

Some brief arguments in favour:

1) Metaphors /​ analogies can create an ‘aha’ moment where the outline of a complex idea is grasped easily and retained by the listener, which they can then layer nuance on top of. People might otherwise not grasp certain complex EA ideas so easily.

2) Whilst explaining a position in logical sequence with great attention to detail is often effective for influencing (and is the main communication approach observed in this forum), I assume that lots of people are not ‘hooked’ by that approach, or find the line of reasoning too abstract to wish to change their mindset of behaviour in response to it.

3) Metaphors /​ analogies can be more memorable, and therefore transfer from person to person or ‘spread’ better than prosaic reasoning.

4) If you assume that people often have weak attention spans and inaccurate recollection memory, then 1-3 are even stronger arguments in favour of using metaphors more.

The examples the OP chooses (e.g. Dr Strangelove) prove that communicating an idea through art requires the artist’s ambition to be matched with huge skill, so this strikes me as ‘high risk, high gain’ territory. But we can probably make some decent gains by developing some metaphorical or allegorical ways of communicating EA thinking, testing them out and iterating.....and THEN seeing if people who we want to communicate our messages to apprehend them better.

I like this idea a lot. I’ve been playing with the idea of writing a bildungsroman around some of my insights into personal development, which of course touches on topics related to EA and rationality, so I’m quite fond of seeing others do this as well.

What’s worth noting is that I haven’t done it because I’m constantly pulled by other things that seem higher priority. This is maybe the big challenge for making more EA art: its comparative benefit. I’m tempted to say “maybe there will be more time for EA art when EA is bigger”, but if that’s the case it’s a chicken-and-egg problem because EA art seems to be a great way to grow the movement.

So on the whole my guess is we can’t directly go for EA art beyond making sure folks in the community are more aware that it’s a thing they could maybe do so that on the margin we might get more EA art replacing EA-relevant art that would have otherwise been produced.

Interesting post with a good angle, thank you for taking the time to write about this!

I’ve also been playing around with the idea of using art or some kind of interactive medium to convey EA concepts. I completely agree that it’s important that ideas are not “pushed” as EA, but rather the work allows room for the viewer to discover the benefits of these ideas for themselves.

One idea I’ve had that I haven’t seen explored elsewhere is a video/​board game about welfare and existential risk. For example, the player(s) might step into the shoes of a world leader, drafting policies to limit risks while maximizing global happiness. They would be gradually introduced to various concepts regarding existential risk, while having interesting and challenging game systems to play against.

One of the benefits with this approach is that it doesn’t have to be EA branded at all, yet can introduce difficult concepts with ease and nudge people to study or discuss these topics on their own. It would also be niche enough that market validation is important, but the costs for that could greatly be reduced through building a prototype and running a crowdfunding campaign.

In fact, I had some free time last weekend and built a functional prototype with realistic data. It’s obviously at a very early stage, but could be expanded in a variety of directions. In my opinion the interactivity can bring an immersive extra dimension to a work, and can help users realize new ways to think about the causality of something.

https://​​imgur.com/​​85XanzS

I was surprised not to see documentaries on the list. I recognize the show, don’t tell aim. But you can do a lot of showing with documentaries. The price point is higher and also harder to create, but it has potentially large reach and is easily shareable. It also has a lower commitment for consumption than a book and can have a clear call to action. Perhaps this approach misses the premise of what you’re aiming at though.

Next up would be a fictional movie, but that’s potentially even higher cost.

Note on Forum images: You can click and drag images when you’re in your post editor to expand them to the full width of the post. I’ve done this for the images in your post; you may want to remove the written-out text of the table.