Based on EAF’s experience in Germany and Switzerland, I strongly agree with Ben’s main points in the post. In the early days we made several mistakes that could have been prevented fairly easily. In particular, it seems hard to correct the perception that EA is not just about donating (to GiveWell top charities). It also remains very difficult to counter the impression that EA is mainly the practical implementation of Singer’s views; e.g. Singer’s views on infanticide get quoted in many media articles about EA.
Some of the challenges that might have led to this:
DGB and Singer’s EA book were translated to German, but much of the more advanced content is only available in English.
Quickly translating English content is easy. However, it takes much more time to ensure high quality both in terms of language and framings/nuance, and it’s even more challenging to keep these translations up to date. See the “fidelity model” blog post referenced above for more discussion of this.
The media frequently interview members of the community. Community members are more or less up to date with recent EA publications and would explain EA well, but the media very proactively ask about charitable donations and related issues. It takes a lot of active effort and experience with media interviews to counter this pigeonholing, which is hard to do without much practice. I personally find it pretty hard to give good guidance on this.
So as a conclusion, I think the expansion to Germany, Switzerland, and Austria could have gone much better still, and while I agree it could be the deemed most successful case of translation of EA content, I think it was worse than what we should be aiming for.
Based on EAF’s experience in Germany and Switzerland, I strongly agree with Ben’s main points in the post. In the early days we made several mistakes that could have been prevented fairly easily. In particular, it seems hard to correct the perception that EA is not just about donating (to GiveWell top charities). It also remains very difficult to counter the impression that EA is mainly the practical implementation of Singer’s views; e.g. Singer’s views on infanticide get quoted in many media articles about EA.
Some of the challenges that might have led to this:
DGB and Singer’s EA book were translated to German, but much of the more advanced content is only available in English.
Quickly translating English content is easy. However, it takes much more time to ensure high quality both in terms of language and framings/nuance, and it’s even more challenging to keep these translations up to date. See the “fidelity model” blog post referenced above for more discussion of this.
The media frequently interview members of the community. Community members are more or less up to date with recent EA publications and would explain EA well, but the media very proactively ask about charitable donations and related issues. It takes a lot of active effort and experience with media interviews to counter this pigeonholing, which is hard to do without much practice. I personally find it pretty hard to give good guidance on this.
So as a conclusion, I think the expansion to Germany, Switzerland, and Austria could have gone much better still, and while I agree it could be the deemed most successful case of translation of EA content, I think it was worse than what we should be aiming for.
That’s really great feedback. Thanks.