Sounds like a joke, but it’s serious. My theory of politics is that basically all politics are identity politics. ‘Identity politics’ has traditionally been used to mean things like “Black person cares about race issues’ or ‘Woman cares about women’s issues’, but I think it goes beyond that. Tribalism is infecting virtually everything we do and every issue we care about, and when you get separated into tribes you develop identities. ‘Neoliberal’ and ‘Socialist’ are identities today, there are people who strongly identify as those things, whose sense of self is defined by them to some extent. ‘Trump fan’ is an identity. ‘Coal miner’ and ‘Gun owner’ and ‘Anti-racist’ and ‘Bayesian statistician’ and ‘Breastfeeding mother’ are identities. Every single one of these groups has their inside jokes, their memes, their semi-religious hero figures and iconography, their organizations, their hated outgroup, etc.
One thing that I really believe is that for a movement to grow, there has to be a coherent sense of identity uniting members of the movement. You can get a little ways purely on ideas and convincing people with long explanatory argumentation, but only a little. To grow further you’ve got to make people want to be part of the organization on a tribal level, to not just agree with you but identify as you. And one of the primary ways to do that is silly memes, insider jokes and symbols you all use together, etc. Group identifiers.
Even Julia Galef, leading rationalist/EA spokesperson, wrote a book about how to be a more rational thinker… and ended up endorsing identity formation. The entire point of The Scout Mindset is to stop letting your identity do your thinking for you, which I agree with… but in the end you can’t really escape the pull of identity unless you start to develop an identity as ‘the sort of person who doesn’t get sucked into tribal politics’. Galef calls this ‘developing the Scout Mindset’, which I would call identifying as a Scout.
So I’m very serious when I say that the lack of an EA emoji identifier to put in your twitter handle is holding you back. I really believe that matters. Neoliberals are globes. The DSA has the red rose. YIMBYs have the Avocado. Urbanists use a crane or a building emoji. There are specific emojis for crypto fans, Georgists, social democrats, free trade lovers, and even more niche topics. Why not EA?
I guess in many ways, I like neoliberalism for being coherent with EA but it being fine if people hate it. So I can share neoliberal memes and not really mind if they get people’s backs up a bit, because we all know that politics is a bit annoying like that.
I think EA has fewer direct competitors and hence it’s more risky if people get turned off. Here we have neoliberal EAs, republican EAs, sock EAs. Would that be true if we had a push for EA to be an identity on the same level as neoliberalism?
There sort of is—I’ve seen some EAs use the light bulb emoji 💡 on Twitter (I assume this comes from the EA logo) -- but it’s not widely used, and it’s unclear to me whether it means “identifies as an EA” or “is a practicing EA” (i.e. donates a substantial percentage of their income to EA causes and/or does direct work on those causes).
I’m unsure whether I want there to be an easy way to “identify as EA”, since identities do seem to make people worse at thinking clearly. I’ve thought/written about this (in the context of a neoliberal identity too, as it happens), and my conclusion was basically that a strong EA identity would be okay so long as the centerpiece of the identity continues to be a question (“How can we do the most good?”) as opposed to any particular answer. I’m not sure how realistic that is, though.
I second your hesitation about the upside/downside to “identifying as an EA”. But I honestly don’t think you can help this sort of thing happening. The most you can do is actively guide the values that are defining your group. In the early days of the neoliberal subreddit (the earliest large-scale group of modern self-identified neoliberals), one of the slogans we used was ‘evidence based policy’. The leaders and prominent members of the subreddit tried to instill ‘evidence based policy’ as a core value to the members, to offset the dangers of groupthink, to make people be willing to change their minds. EBP is a complicated subject and it’s not like most people are really out there reading research papers. But it’s important to at least have people signaling that they are open to changing their minds. Signaling can become reality.
You need more emojis and memes.
Sounds like a joke, but it’s serious. My theory of politics is that basically all politics are identity politics. ‘Identity politics’ has traditionally been used to mean things like “Black person cares about race issues’ or ‘Woman cares about women’s issues’, but I think it goes beyond that. Tribalism is infecting virtually everything we do and every issue we care about, and when you get separated into tribes you develop identities. ‘Neoliberal’ and ‘Socialist’ are identities today, there are people who strongly identify as those things, whose sense of self is defined by them to some extent. ‘Trump fan’ is an identity. ‘Coal miner’ and ‘Gun owner’ and ‘Anti-racist’ and ‘Bayesian statistician’ and ‘Breastfeeding mother’ are identities. Every single one of these groups has their inside jokes, their memes, their semi-religious hero figures and iconography, their organizations, their hated outgroup, etc.
One thing that I really believe is that for a movement to grow, there has to be a coherent sense of identity uniting members of the movement. You can get a little ways purely on ideas and convincing people with long explanatory argumentation, but only a little. To grow further you’ve got to make people want to be part of the organization on a tribal level, to not just agree with you but identify as you. And one of the primary ways to do that is silly memes, insider jokes and symbols you all use together, etc. Group identifiers.
Even Julia Galef, leading rationalist/EA spokesperson, wrote a book about how to be a more rational thinker… and ended up endorsing identity formation. The entire point of The Scout Mindset is to stop letting your identity do your thinking for you, which I agree with… but in the end you can’t really escape the pull of identity unless you start to develop an identity as ‘the sort of person who doesn’t get sucked into tribal politics’. Galef calls this ‘developing the Scout Mindset’, which I would call identifying as a Scout.
So I’m very serious when I say that the lack of an EA emoji identifier to put in your twitter handle is holding you back. I really believe that matters. Neoliberals are globes. The DSA has the red rose. YIMBYs have the Avocado. Urbanists use a crane or a building emoji. There are specific emojis for crypto fans, Georgists, social democrats, free trade lovers, and even more niche topics. Why not EA?
I guess in many ways, I like neoliberalism for being coherent with EA but it being fine if people hate it. So I can share neoliberal memes and not really mind if they get people’s backs up a bit, because we all know that politics is a bit annoying like that.
I think EA has fewer direct competitors and hence it’s more risky if people get turned off. Here we have neoliberal EAs, republican EAs, sock EAs. Would that be true if we had a push for EA to be an identity on the same level as neoliberalism?
There sort of is—I’ve seen some EAs use the light bulb emoji 💡 on Twitter (I assume this comes from the EA logo) -- but it’s not widely used, and it’s unclear to me whether it means “identifies as an EA” or “is a practicing EA” (i.e. donates a substantial percentage of their income to EA causes and/or does direct work on those causes).
I’m unsure whether I want there to be an easy way to “identify as EA”, since identities do seem to make people worse at thinking clearly. I’ve thought/written about this (in the context of a neoliberal identity too, as it happens), and my conclusion was basically that a strong EA identity would be okay so long as the centerpiece of the identity continues to be a question (“How can we do the most good?”) as opposed to any particular answer. I’m not sure how realistic that is, though.
Loved the post you linked!
I second your hesitation about the upside/downside to “identifying as an EA”. But I honestly don’t think you can help this sort of thing happening. The most you can do is actively guide the values that are defining your group. In the early days of the neoliberal subreddit (the earliest large-scale group of modern self-identified neoliberals), one of the slogans we used was ‘evidence based policy’. The leaders and prominent members of the subreddit tried to instill ‘evidence based policy’ as a core value to the members, to offset the dangers of groupthink, to make people be willing to change their minds. EBP is a complicated subject and it’s not like most people are really out there reading research papers. But it’s important to at least have people signaling that they are open to changing their minds. Signaling can become reality.
Did you succeed in guiding the values? Did the ‘evidence based policy’ become part of Neo-liberal internet identity?
I’m not saying you’re wrong but I find such visible identification distasteful. That’s the reason I don’t use the lightbulb.
I don’t want everyone to know everything about me just by which emojis are in my handle. Maybe I’m wrong about that.