Further refining messaging for the EA movement, exploring different ways of talking about EA to improve EA recruitment and increase diversity.
Further work to explore better ways to talk about longtermism to the general public, to help EAs communicate longtermism more persuasively and to increase support for desired longtermist policies in the US and the UK.
What kind of research do you plan on doing to answer these questions?
Did you consider other areas of EA movement building apart from messaging before choosing this one, and if so how did you narrow down your options?
Do you see general EA messaging as part of your longtermist focus, or is this a separate category? Either ways, how do you figure out how to allocate resources to this movement building-related efforts?
What kind of research do you plan on doing to answer these questions?
I will be working on both of these projects with David Moss. Our plan is to run surveys of the general public that describe EA (or longtermism) and ask questions to gauge how people view the message. We’d then experimentally change the message to explore how different framings change support, with the idea that messages that engender more support on the survey are likely to be more successful overall. For EA messaging, we’d furthermore look at support broken down by different demographics to see if there are more inclusive messages out there. We did a similar project we did for animal welfare messaging on live shackle slaughter, which you can look at to get a sense of what we do. We also have a lot of unpublished animal welfare messaging work we’re eager to get out there as soon as we can.
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Did you consider other areas of EA movement building apart from messaging before choosing this one, and if so how did you narrow down your options?
As you know, we do run the EA Survey and Local Groups Survey. Right now, our main goal is to stay within analysis of EA movement building rather than work to directly build the movement like other groups (e.g., CEA, 80K, GWWC, TLYCS) already do. We see these messaging studies as a good next step. However, we have not systematically compared opportunities yet as we don’t have the staff or funding right now to do such a search.
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Do you see general EA messaging as part of your longtermist focus, or is this a separate category?
We see these as separate projects in separate cause areas, though there will definitely be a lot of cross-cause learning. Note that we also do this for farmed animal welfare as well and may also do so in wild animal welfare in the near future. It is a very useful thing to do for all sorts of causes!
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Either ways, how do you figure out how to allocate resources to this movement building-related efforts?
Right now we just have allocated funding from restricted funding and a portion of our unrestricted funding. We will also likely fundraise for this work specifically from interested donors.
Regarding the following research areas for 2021:
What kind of research do you plan on doing to answer these questions?
Did you consider other areas of EA movement building apart from messaging before choosing this one, and if so how did you narrow down your options?
Do you see general EA messaging as part of your longtermist focus, or is this a separate category? Either ways, how do you figure out how to allocate resources to this movement building-related efforts?
Hi Vaidehi,
I will be working on both of these projects with David Moss. Our plan is to run surveys of the general public that describe EA (or longtermism) and ask questions to gauge how people view the message. We’d then experimentally change the message to explore how different framings change support, with the idea that messages that engender more support on the survey are likely to be more successful overall. For EA messaging, we’d furthermore look at support broken down by different demographics to see if there are more inclusive messages out there. We did a similar project we did for animal welfare messaging on live shackle slaughter, which you can look at to get a sense of what we do. We also have a lot of unpublished animal welfare messaging work we’re eager to get out there as soon as we can.
~
As you know, we do run the EA Survey and Local Groups Survey. Right now, our main goal is to stay within analysis of EA movement building rather than work to directly build the movement like other groups (e.g., CEA, 80K, GWWC, TLYCS) already do. We see these messaging studies as a good next step. However, we have not systematically compared opportunities yet as we don’t have the staff or funding right now to do such a search.
~
We see these as separate projects in separate cause areas, though there will definitely be a lot of cross-cause learning. Note that we also do this for farmed animal welfare as well and may also do so in wild animal welfare in the near future. It is a very useful thing to do for all sorts of causes!
~
Right now we just have allocated funding from restricted funding and a portion of our unrestricted funding. We will also likely fundraise for this work specifically from interested donors.