Hm, as someone who grew up in a rural, conservative town, I’ve never heard of social justice lingo like racism or sexism alienating people in a relevant way. I think the issues come in with more extreme ideas like radical feminism or exclusively race-based affirmative action. I think people generally have a sturdy psychological barrier between the mainstream social justice material and the more extreme, possibly triggering material.
Given that I expect that conservatives are under-represented among EAs, I think we should probably avoid going out of our way to alienate them any further.
I’d like to see more discussion about who our target audience is as EAs. I’d guess it’s more of the social justice/altruism crowd rather than conservatives, even if conservatives are currently under-represented. I often think it’s the intelligentsia of some sort, which is relatively liberal. Although if we’re reaching out towards ‘old money’ for philanthropy purposes, this might be different.
I’m going to be honest, the target audience is privileged liberals for the most part, i.e. people with unexceptional centre to centre-left politics, with an enormous (relative to history and the world) amount of wealth, education and so forth, with a certain moralism about them. That composition is not flattering, being mostly white graduates or academics from the USA/UK, but is necessarily so for a world-view turning on giving away ones money and/or doing high-level research into how to give away ones money.
But introducing new and unusual-sounding terms like locationism and speciesism is presumably more likely to be associated with the extreme ideas than the mainstream.
Hm, as someone who grew up in a rural, conservative town, I’ve never heard of social justice lingo like racism or sexism alienating people in a relevant way. I think the issues come in with more extreme ideas like radical feminism or exclusively race-based affirmative action. I think people generally have a sturdy psychological barrier between the mainstream social justice material and the more extreme, possibly triggering material.
I’d like to see more discussion about who our target audience is as EAs. I’d guess it’s more of the social justice/altruism crowd rather than conservatives, even if conservatives are currently under-represented. I often think it’s the intelligentsia of some sort, which is relatively liberal. Although if we’re reaching out towards ‘old money’ for philanthropy purposes, this might be different.
I’m going to be honest, the target audience is privileged liberals for the most part, i.e. people with unexceptional centre to centre-left politics, with an enormous (relative to history and the world) amount of wealth, education and so forth, with a certain moralism about them. That composition is not flattering, being mostly white graduates or academics from the USA/UK, but is necessarily so for a world-view turning on giving away ones money and/or doing high-level research into how to give away ones money.
But introducing new and unusual-sounding terms like locationism and speciesism is presumably more likely to be associated with the extreme ideas than the mainstream.
Yep.