Thanks so much for writing this up! I really appreciate hearing more about what’s going on inside different groups. I’m especially excited to see the work being done in professional groups.
Hearing ideas without them being exclusively attached to a wider philosophy and in more neutral (rather than persuasive) fashion may help avoid putting people off and allows individuals the freedom to pick aspects they found more meaningful to explore. This helps encourage a ‘truth seeking’ approach that focuses on ‘learning useful tools and asking important questions [… ] and helping [individuals] have the biggest impact they can’ rather than the impression that EA was a large, take-it-or-leave-it all-encompassing philosophy you must be persuaded of. The objective was not to subtly trick people into becoming more EA but to provide information about ideas that we thought were important, worthy of discussion and that people may be receptive to. We found that some of our members did in fact become more involved in EA more broadly, whilst several individuals took on board ideas that are common in EA but felt ambivalently or negatively towards EA as a wider movement.
I think this is a really great approach. You get to ‘have your cake and eat it’ by connecting people interested in EA to it and nudging many more people to higher-impact option in a way that encourages a lot of autonomy and agency. I also quite like the approach mentioned in footnote #2.
Thanks Luke, I definitely think that autonomy and agency, particularly for professionals who are already established in a career, is a good approach to take, and might be a slight difference between community building in university/for professional groups (at least anecdotally, this is our experience).
And on footnote (2), I think this is actually something reasonably important I want to write more about-for instance, in our fellowship, we noticed that people responded well to information that was from well-known sources like high impact journals or news sources, and we found that if we had too many docs from sources they were unfamilar with (EA Forum), it bred some hesitation and skepticism. Although I think there is a wealth of absolutely fantastic material on ‘EA sources’, I think this is an important thing to be aware of in doing outreach to people unfamiliar with EA!
Thanks so much for writing this up! I really appreciate hearing more about what’s going on inside different groups. I’m especially excited to see the work being done in professional groups.
I think this is a really great approach. You get to ‘have your cake and eat it’ by connecting people interested in EA to it and nudging many more people to higher-impact option in a way that encourages a lot of autonomy and agency. I also quite like the approach mentioned in footnote #2.
Thanks Luke, I definitely think that autonomy and agency, particularly for professionals who are already established in a career, is a good approach to take, and might be a slight difference between community building in university/for professional groups (at least anecdotally, this is our experience).
And on footnote (2), I think this is actually something reasonably important I want to write more about-for instance, in our fellowship, we noticed that people responded well to information that was from well-known sources like high impact journals or news sources, and we found that if we had too many docs from sources they were unfamilar with (EA Forum), it bred some hesitation and skepticism. Although I think there is a wealth of absolutely fantastic material on ‘EA sources’, I think this is an important thing to be aware of in doing outreach to people unfamiliar with EA!