This is a good heuristic for talking about EA with new people, but I think it should be used with even more patience and perspective-taking.
When I’ve taught college courses on EA, many of the students start out with very local concerns, or typical partisan political values they want to promote. In my experience, it’s almost never effective to try to challenge their heartfelt, highly-invested commitments to certain familiar cause areas—however silly or scope-insensitive I think some of them may be.
Instead, and in alignment with your suggestion, it’s often helpful to just ask questions about how one might measure impact in their existing favorite cause area, and what strategies might produce the most impact by those metrics, and what their pros and cons and opportunity costs might be. It takes a few weeks for students to get used to thinking in those terms—not just a few minutes.
But I do find that once people start thinking in terms of any cost/benefit reasoning, they do tend to start questioning which cause areas might be more important than what they’ve focused on. But I think they need to be able to do this on their own time frame, without being preached at, intellectually bullied, or patronized.
This is a good heuristic for talking about EA with new people, but I think it should be used with even more patience and perspective-taking.
When I’ve taught college courses on EA, many of the students start out with very local concerns, or typical partisan political values they want to promote. In my experience, it’s almost never effective to try to challenge their heartfelt, highly-invested commitments to certain familiar cause areas—however silly or scope-insensitive I think some of them may be.
Instead, and in alignment with your suggestion, it’s often helpful to just ask questions about how one might measure impact in their existing favorite cause area, and what strategies might produce the most impact by those metrics, and what their pros and cons and opportunity costs might be. It takes a few weeks for students to get used to thinking in those terms—not just a few minutes.
But I do find that once people start thinking in terms of any cost/benefit reasoning, they do tend to start questioning which cause areas might be more important than what they’ve focused on. But I think they need to be able to do this on their own time frame, without being preached at, intellectually bullied, or patronized.