Wouldn’t this be difficult to test. I mean, the goal of effective altruism outreach is to reach out to thousands and convince them to join the movement. So, if someone posits it’s better for us to reach out with a message of expanding the circle of compassion rather than doing the most good, it seems like we’ll need to do prior reasoning about what we expect to work better. I mean, will anyone randomly assign activists to spread one or the other message, wait several years to see how convincing one message or the other was to see how it changed all sorts of hard-to-measure behaviors across hundreds of people, ensure those reached out to only receive one message and not the other, even as they may join effective altruism, and reach a conclusion?
When it reaches the scale of building a social movement, it might be beyond the scope of science. In the mean time, others might think it imperative to try building the movement or changing the values of others whether than waiting for the tests results to come back. I’m not saying it’s impossible. It’s just seems it would be so hard to test this, as hard as anything I can think of really trying, it might defeat the purpose. Vegan or human rights activists don’t wait for tests. That hasn’t stopped them from being successful. It’s possible they could’ve been more successful, but knowing there will be some success might be better to them than expecting maybe none or maybe more.
Psychologists run experiments at that sort of scale, but they do so in controlled environments. We won’t have that privilege. Maybe I’m thinking of something too grand. Maybe you’re thinking of small and short-term experiments where people are exposed to one or other behavior and fill out a survey responding how much it changed their impression of helping others. I’d doubt something like that would tell us anything interesting about long-term behavior change though, which is the goal of effective altruism outreach.
Wouldn’t this be difficult to test. I mean, the goal of effective altruism outreach is to reach out to thousands and convince them to join the movement. So, if someone posits it’s better for us to reach out with a message of expanding the circle of compassion rather than doing the most good, it seems like we’ll need to do prior reasoning about what we expect to work better. I mean, will anyone randomly assign activists to spread one or the other message, wait several years to see how convincing one message or the other was to see how it changed all sorts of hard-to-measure behaviors across hundreds of people, ensure those reached out to only receive one message and not the other, even as they may join effective altruism, and reach a conclusion?
When it reaches the scale of building a social movement, it might be beyond the scope of science. In the mean time, others might think it imperative to try building the movement or changing the values of others whether than waiting for the tests results to come back. I’m not saying it’s impossible. It’s just seems it would be so hard to test this, as hard as anything I can think of really trying, it might defeat the purpose. Vegan or human rights activists don’t wait for tests. That hasn’t stopped them from being successful. It’s possible they could’ve been more successful, but knowing there will be some success might be better to them than expecting maybe none or maybe more.
Psychologists run experiments at that sort of scale, but they do so in controlled environments. We won’t have that privilege. Maybe I’m thinking of something too grand. Maybe you’re thinking of small and short-term experiments where people are exposed to one or other behavior and fill out a survey responding how much it changed their impression of helping others. I’d doubt something like that would tell us anything interesting about long-term behavior change though, which is the goal of effective altruism outreach.