Short version of my long-winded response: I agree that promotion is great and that we should do more of it if we see growth slowing down, but I donât see an obvious reason why promotion requires âruthlessnessâ or more engagement with criticism.
Iâm in favor of promoting EA, and perhaps being a bit less humble than we have been in our recent public communication. I really like cases where someone politely but firmly rebukes bad criticism. McMahan 2016 is the gold standard, but Will MacAskill recently engaged in some of this himself.
At the same time, Iâve had many interactions, and heard of many more interactions, where someone with undeniable talent explained that EA came across to them as arrogant or at least insufficiently humbled, to an extent that they were more reluctant to engage than they would have been otherwise.
Sometimes, theyâd gotten the wrong idea secondhand from critics, but they were frequently able to point to specific conversations theyâd had with community members; when I followed up on some of those examples, I saw a lot of arrogant, misguided, and epistemically sketchy promotion of EA ideas.
The latter will happen in any movement of sufficient size, but I think that a slight official move toward ruthlessness could lead to a substantial increase in the number of Twitter threads I see where someone responds to a reasonable question/âcritique with silly trolling rather than gentle pushback or a link to a relevant article.
How frequently are people who take action for their âteamsâ actually doing something effective? For all the apparent success of, say, extremist American political movements, they are much smaller and weaker in reality than the media paints them as. Flailing about on Twitter rarely leads to policy change; donor money often goes to ridiculous boondoggle projects rather than effective movement-building efforts. I canât think of many times Iâve seen two groups conflict-theorying at each other and thought âah, yes, I see that group X is winning, and will therefore get lasting benefit from this fightâ.
So far, EA has done a pretty good job of avoiding zero-sum fights in favor of quiet persuasion on the margins, and in doing so, weâve moved a lot of money/âtalent/âattention.
If we start picking more fights (or at least not letting fights die down), this ties up our attention and tosses us into a very crowded market.
Can EA get any appreciable share of, say, anti-Trump dollars, when we are competing with the ACLU and Planned Parenthood?
Will presidential candidates (aside from Andrew Yang) bother to call for more aid funding or better AI policy when constituencies around issues like healthcare and diversity are still a hundred times our size?
It is likely that popular appeal can help EA achieve some of its aims; it could grow our talent pool, increase available fundraising dollars, and maybe help us push through some of our policy projects.
On the other hand, much of the appeal that EA already has is tied to the way it differs from other social movements. Being âniceâ in a Bay Area/âOxford sense has helped us attract hundreds of skilled people from around the world who share that particular taste (and often wound up moving to Oxford or the Bay Area). How many of these people would leave, or never be found at all, if EA shifted in the direction of âruthlessnessâ?
----
But this all feels like Iâm nitpicking at one half of your point. Iâm on board with this:
Every person needs to look in their own life and environment to decide for themselves what they should do to develop a more powerful EA movement, and this is going to vary person to person.
Some people are really good at taking critics apart, and more power to them. Even more power to people who can produce wildly popular pro-EA content that brings in lots of new people; Peter Singer has been doing this for decades, and people like Julia Galef and Max Roser and Kelsey Piper are major assets.
But âbeing proud of EA and happy to promote itâ doesnât have to mean âgetting into fightsâ. Total ignorance of EA is a much larger (smaller?) bottleneck to our growth than âmisguided opposition that could be reversed with enough debateâ.
So far, the âofficialâ/ââformalâ EA approach to criticism has been a mix of âpolite acknowledgement as we stay the courseâ, âcrushing responses from good writersâ, and âignoring it to focus on changing the worldâ. This seems basically fine.
What leads you to believe that the problem of âgrowth tapering offâ is linked to âinsufficient ruthlessnessâ rather than âinsufficient cheerful promotion without reference to criticsâ?
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 donât 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 âaspiring Effective Altruistâ 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?
I work for CEA, but these views are my own.
Ruthlessness comment:
Short version of my long-winded response: I agree that promotion is great and that we should do more of it if we see growth slowing down, but I donât see an obvious reason why promotion requires âruthlessnessâ or more engagement with criticism.
Iâm in favor of promoting EA, and perhaps being a bit less humble than we have been in our recent public communication. I really like cases where someone politely but firmly rebukes bad criticism. McMahan 2016 is the gold standard, but Will MacAskill recently engaged in some of this himself.
At the same time, Iâve had many interactions, and heard of many more interactions, where someone with undeniable talent explained that EA came across to them as arrogant or at least insufficiently humbled, to an extent that they were more reluctant to engage than they would have been otherwise.
Sometimes, theyâd gotten the wrong idea secondhand from critics, but they were frequently able to point to specific conversations theyâd had with community members; when I followed up on some of those examples, I saw a lot of arrogant, misguided, and epistemically sketchy promotion of EA ideas.
The latter will happen in any movement of sufficient size, but I think that a slight official move toward ruthlessness could lead to a substantial increase in the number of Twitter threads I see where someone responds to a reasonable question/âcritique with silly trolling rather than gentle pushback or a link to a relevant article.
How frequently are people who take action for their âteamsâ actually doing something effective? For all the apparent success of, say, extremist American political movements, they are much smaller and weaker in reality than the media paints them as. Flailing about on Twitter rarely leads to policy change; donor money often goes to ridiculous boondoggle projects rather than effective movement-building efforts. I canât think of many times Iâve seen two groups conflict-theorying at each other and thought âah, yes, I see that group X is winning, and will therefore get lasting benefit from this fightâ.
So far, EA has done a pretty good job of avoiding zero-sum fights in favor of quiet persuasion on the margins, and in doing so, weâve moved a lot of money/âtalent/âattention.
If we start picking more fights (or at least not letting fights die down), this ties up our attention and tosses us into a very crowded market.
Can EA get any appreciable share of, say, anti-Trump dollars, when we are competing with the ACLU and Planned Parenthood?
Will presidential candidates (aside from Andrew Yang) bother to call for more aid funding or better AI policy when constituencies around issues like healthcare and diversity are still a hundred times our size?
It is likely that popular appeal can help EA achieve some of its aims; it could grow our talent pool, increase available fundraising dollars, and maybe help us push through some of our policy projects.
On the other hand, much of the appeal that EA already has is tied to the way it differs from other social movements. Being âniceâ in a Bay Area/âOxford sense has helped us attract hundreds of skilled people from around the world who share that particular taste (and often wound up moving to Oxford or the Bay Area). How many of these people would leave, or never be found at all, if EA shifted in the direction of âruthlessnessâ?
----
But this all feels like Iâm nitpicking at one half of your point. Iâm on board with this:
Some people are really good at taking critics apart, and more power to them. Even more power to people who can produce wildly popular pro-EA content that brings in lots of new people; Peter Singer has been doing this for decades, and people like Julia Galef and Max Roser and Kelsey Piper are major assets.
But âbeing proud of EA and happy to promote itâ doesnât have to mean âgetting into fightsâ. Total ignorance of EA is a much larger (smaller?) bottleneck to our growth than âmisguided opposition that could be reversed with enough debateâ.
So far, the âofficialâ/ââformalâ EA approach to criticism has been a mix of âpolite acknowledgement as we stay the courseâ, âcrushing responses from good writersâ, and âignoring it to focus on changing the worldâ. This seems basically fine.
What leads you to believe that the problem of âgrowth tapering offâ is linked to âinsufficient ruthlessnessâ rather than âinsufficient cheerful promotion without reference to criticsâ?
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 donât 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 âaspiring Effective Altruistâ 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?