This need not be about ruthlessness directed right at your interlocutor, but rather towards a distant or ill-specified other.
I think it would be uncontroversial that a better approach is not to present yourself as authoritative, but instead present a conception of general authority in EA scholarship and consensus, and demand that it be recognized, engaged with, cited and so on.
Ruthless content drives higher exposure and awareness in the very first place.
There seems like an inadequate sticking rate of people who are just exposed to EA, consider for instance the high school awareness project.
Also, there seems like a shortage of new people who will gather other new people. When you just present the nice message, you just get a wave of people who may follow EA in their own right but don’t go out of their way to continue pushing it further. Because it was presented to them merely as part of their worldview rather than as part of their identity. (Consider whether the occasionally popular phrase “aspiring Effective Altruist” obstructs one from having an real EA identity.) How much movement growth is being done by people who joined in the recent few years compared to the early core?
This need not be about ruthlessness directed right at your interlocutor, but rather towards a distant or ill-specified other.
I think it would be uncontroversial that a better approach is not to present yourself as authoritative, but instead present a conception of general authority in EA scholarship and consensus, and demand that it be recognized, engaged with, cited and so on.
Ruthless content drives higher exposure and awareness in the very first place.
There seems like an inadequate sticking rate of people who are just exposed to EA, consider for instance the high school awareness project.
Also, there seems like a shortage of new people who will gather other new people. When you just present the nice message, you just get a wave of people who may follow EA in their own right but don’t go out of their way to continue pushing it further. Because it was presented to them merely as part of their worldview rather than as part of their identity. (Consider whether the occasionally popular phrase “aspiring Effective Altruist” obstructs one from having an real EA identity.) How much movement growth is being done by people who joined in the recent few years compared to the early core?