I agree with Habrykaâs caution, but Iâve been starting to see some of the same effects Evan mentions. Specifically, after seeing an EA friend do the same, I set up an IFTTT rule (the link may not work for you, IFTTT restricts sharing) that finds all Tweets using terms like âeffective altruismâ or âeffective altruistsâ.
Each morning, I get an email with the dayâs Tweets. Many of them are content from EA orgs, but some reveal conversations happening in corners of the internet that seem quite separate from the broader âEA communityâ.
Some of those conversations are negative, but most are positive; there is a slowly growing population of people who heard the term âeffective altruismâ at some point and now use it in conversations about giving without feeling the need to explain themselves. As our movement grows, this will have a lot of effects, good and bad, and it seems worth thinking about.
(If you decide to set up your own IFTTT rule for Twitter or anywhere else, my personal opinion is that itâs better to avoid jumping into random conversations with strangers, especially if your goal is to âcorrectâ a criticism they made. It wonât work.)
(If you decide to set up your own IFTTT rule for Twitter or anywhere else, my personal opinion is that itâs better to avoid jumping into random conversations with strangers, especially if your goal is to âcorrectâ a criticism they made. It wonât work.)
Depending on the context, there could be many more people reading the conversation than the person who had the misconception. (IIRC, research into lurker:participant ratios in online conversations often comes up with numbers like 10:1 or 100:1.) If the misconception goes uncorrected then many more people could acquire it. I think correcting misconceptions online can be a really good use of time.
Iâve only been doing this for a few weeks, so not yet. Iâm archiving all the emails I get, so eventually I should have a reasonable trend estimate. Iâve set a reminder to check in on this in six months.
It should be possible to scrape from twitter for earlier dates.
From my feedly since July 13th 2018 there have been at least 1650 tweets with the phraseâeffective altruismâ and 128 with the phrase âeffective altruistâ.
As a side note it seems that there are a higher proportion of negative tweets with âeffective altruistâ than âeffective altruismâ.
I went back and looked at an earlier Feedly I had setup from 18th November 2015 until 3rd March 2016 and there were 2123 mentions of âeffective altruismâ which is over 106 days compared to 130 days in the current example.
I have a suspicion that a few tweets get cut off from my current Feedly which might be one reason it seems to be lower, it could also be that there was a bigger media push in 2015/â2016.
I agree with Habrykaâs caution, but Iâve been starting to see some of the same effects Evan mentions. Specifically, after seeing an EA friend do the same, I set up an IFTTT rule (the link may not work for you, IFTTT restricts sharing) that finds all Tweets using terms like âeffective altruismâ or âeffective altruistsâ.
Each morning, I get an email with the dayâs Tweets. Many of them are content from EA orgs, but some reveal conversations happening in corners of the internet that seem quite separate from the broader âEA communityâ.
Some of those conversations are negative, but most are positive; there is a slowly growing population of people who heard the term âeffective altruismâ at some point and now use it in conversations about giving without feeling the need to explain themselves. As our movement grows, this will have a lot of effects, good and bad, and it seems worth thinking about.
(If you decide to set up your own IFTTT rule for Twitter or anywhere else, my personal opinion is that itâs better to avoid jumping into random conversations with strangers, especially if your goal is to âcorrectâ a criticism they made. It wonât work.)
Depending on the context, there could be many more people reading the conversation than the person who had the misconception. (IIRC, research into lurker:participant ratios in online conversations often comes up with numbers like 10:1 or 100:1.) If the misconception goes uncorrected then many more people could acquire it. I think correcting misconceptions online can be a really good use of time.
Do you have rough data on quantity of tweets over time?
Iâve only been doing this for a few weeks, so not yet. Iâm archiving all the emails I get, so eventually I should have a reasonable trend estimate. Iâve set a reminder to check in on this in six months.
It should be possible to scrape from twitter for earlier dates.
From my feedly since July 13th 2018 there have been at least 1650 tweets with the phraseâeffective altruismâ and 128 with the phrase âeffective altruistâ.
As a side note it seems that there are a higher proportion of negative tweets with âeffective altruistâ than âeffective altruismâ.
I went back and looked at an earlier Feedly I had setup from 18th November 2015 until 3rd March 2016 and there were 2123 mentions of âeffective altruismâ which is over 106 days compared to 130 days in the current example.
I have a suspicion that a few tweets get cut off from my current Feedly which might be one reason it seems to be lower, it could also be that there was a bigger media push in 2015/â2016.