I only hold this view weakly, but yes, I’m worried that, as you put it, “E first, A second” people are less likely to stick around.
I don’t think “A first, E second” people are necessarily easier to get in the first place though, as they are more likely to already have a calling (and so to have less personally to gain) and to be committed to other altruistic pursuits that are hard for them to drop as “ineffective.”
That said, I’ve seen significant movement among heavily committed farmed animal advocates towards thinking more about and acting in the interest of maximizing impact… though farmed animal advocates are often already doing that advocacy because they’re already thinking about effectiveness: they see the issue as massively important and very tractable. So I suppose realistically I’m putting most of my investments in people who are A first, but still clearly already E.
From what I’ve heard, most of the people would are A first are already involved in causes. Now, unfortunately, there is a sense in which EA unavoidably is threatening, as the logical implication is often is that the work that they have done is less impactful than it could have been and that their current work or things they are working towards are less effective than it could have been. And we can phrase things as nicely as we want, and talk about how you can do EA plus other things and that all charity work is valuable even if it isn’t EA and that there are valuable causes we haven’t discovered yet, ect., but at the end of the day, this is still the logical implication and no matter what we do, this will make people uncomfortable. This effect is especially bad since if everyone adopted EA, it is likely certain organisations would cease to exist.
Further, because we unavoidably threaten current power structures within charity, many people there have written incredibly unfair articles articles criticising EA and misrepresenting us (there has been valid criticism too, but this is a minority). This makes recruiting A people even harder.
I think this is a big deal, unfortunately. I try to talk about EA very carefully when talking to people who’re “A first”, but people can sense any implicit criticism a mile off. It’s really hard to avoid some variant of “So you think I’ve been wasting my time, then?”
Strangely, “E first” people may be easier to reach because they’re less likely to be already invested in something.
My gut reaction is that most of the people who have stuck around are “E first”, but I think there’s probably a higher base rate of those amongst early adopters, so hard to say.
It seems like we could gather some data on this, though. It’s a vague question, but I suspect most people would be able to answer some variant of “Were you E first or A first? E/A/Other”. Then we could see if that had any relationship to tenure in the community, or anything else. Perhaps an item for the next Effective Altruism survey?
Unfortunately since the respondents would be members of the EA community, it would be hard to control that data for cultural fit in order to get at how robustly EA people from each demographic are. People have stuck around in the community for reasons other than how EA they are or can be, as I hope I’ve shed some light on.
I only hold this view weakly, but yes, I’m worried that, as you put it, “E first, A second” people are less likely to stick around.
I don’t think “A first, E second” people are necessarily easier to get in the first place though, as they are more likely to already have a calling (and so to have less personally to gain) and to be committed to other altruistic pursuits that are hard for them to drop as “ineffective.”
That said, I’ve seen significant movement among heavily committed farmed animal advocates towards thinking more about and acting in the interest of maximizing impact… though farmed animal advocates are often already doing that advocacy because they’re already thinking about effectiveness: they see the issue as massively important and very tractable. So I suppose realistically I’m putting most of my investments in people who are A first, but still clearly already E.
From what I’ve heard, most of the people would are A first are already involved in causes. Now, unfortunately, there is a sense in which EA unavoidably is threatening, as the logical implication is often is that the work that they have done is less impactful than it could have been and that their current work or things they are working towards are less effective than it could have been. And we can phrase things as nicely as we want, and talk about how you can do EA plus other things and that all charity work is valuable even if it isn’t EA and that there are valuable causes we haven’t discovered yet, ect., but at the end of the day, this is still the logical implication and no matter what we do, this will make people uncomfortable. This effect is especially bad since if everyone adopted EA, it is likely certain organisations would cease to exist.
Further, because we unavoidably threaten current power structures within charity, many people there have written incredibly unfair articles articles criticising EA and misrepresenting us (there has been valid criticism too, but this is a minority). This makes recruiting A people even harder.
I think this is a big deal, unfortunately. I try to talk about EA very carefully when talking to people who’re “A first”, but people can sense any implicit criticism a mile off. It’s really hard to avoid some variant of “So you think I’ve been wasting my time, then?”
Strangely, “E first” people may be easier to reach because they’re less likely to be already invested in something.
My gut reaction is that most of the people who have stuck around are “E first”, but I think there’s probably a higher base rate of those amongst early adopters, so hard to say.
It seems like we could gather some data on this, though. It’s a vague question, but I suspect most people would be able to answer some variant of “Were you E first or A first? E/A/Other”. Then we could see if that had any relationship to tenure in the community, or anything else. Perhaps an item for the next Effective Altruism survey?
Unfortunately since the respondents would be members of the EA community, it would be hard to control that data for cultural fit in order to get at how robustly EA people from each demographic are. People have stuck around in the community for reasons other than how EA they are or can be, as I hope I’ve shed some light on.