I was referring to the impossibility of weighing highly uncertain possibilities against each other.
It’s pretty tough for one article to do all that, AND seriously critique Great Man history, AND explain the history of the Nazi Party.
Well you don’t have to explain it… you just have to not contradict them.
Bottom line: People who took the 2018 EA Survey are twice more likely than the average American to hold a bachelor’s degree, and 7x more likely to hold a Ph.D. That’s why Robin Hanson and GiveWell have been great reading resources so far. But if we actually want EA to go mainstream, we can’t rely on econbloggers and think-tanks to reach most people. We need easier explanations, and I think Vox provides that well.
But when looking through most these articles, I don’t see plausible routes to growing the EA movement. Some of them talk about things like Givewell charities and high-impact actions people can take, occasionally they mention the EA community itself. But many of them, especially these political ones, have no connection. As you say—this isn’t a sequence of blog posts that someone is going to follow over time. They’ll read the article, see an argument about marijuana or whatever that happens to be framed in a nicely consequentialist sort of manner, and then move on.
This is kind of worrying to me—I normally think of Vox as a rational ideological outlet that knows how to produce effective media, often misleading, in order to canvass support for its favored causes. Yet they don’t seem to be applying much of this capacity towards bolstering the EA movement itself, which suggests that it’s really not a priority for them, compared to their favored political issues.
Great discussion here. I’m trying to imagine how most people consume these articles. Linked from the Vox home page? Shared on Facebook or Twitter? Do they realize they aren’t just a standard Vox article? Some probably barely know what Vox is. Certainly, we are all aware of the connection to EA, but I bet most readers are pretty oblivious.
In that case, maybe these tangentially related or unrelated articles don’t matter too much. Conversely, the better articles may spark an interest that leads a few people towards finding out more about EA and becoming involved.
I was referring to the impossibility of weighing highly uncertain possibilities against each other.
Well you don’t have to explain it… you just have to not contradict them.
But when looking through most these articles, I don’t see plausible routes to growing the EA movement. Some of them talk about things like Givewell charities and high-impact actions people can take, occasionally they mention the EA community itself. But many of them, especially these political ones, have no connection. As you say—this isn’t a sequence of blog posts that someone is going to follow over time. They’ll read the article, see an argument about marijuana or whatever that happens to be framed in a nicely consequentialist sort of manner, and then move on.
This is kind of worrying to me—I normally think of Vox as a rational ideological outlet that knows how to produce effective media, often misleading, in order to canvass support for its favored causes. Yet they don’t seem to be applying much of this capacity towards bolstering the EA movement itself, which suggests that it’s really not a priority for them, compared to their favored political issues.
Great discussion here. I’m trying to imagine how most people consume these articles. Linked from the Vox home page? Shared on Facebook or Twitter? Do they realize they aren’t just a standard Vox article? Some probably barely know what Vox is. Certainly, we are all aware of the connection to EA, but I bet most readers are pretty oblivious.
In that case, maybe these tangentially related or unrelated articles don’t matter too much. Conversely, the better articles may spark an interest that leads a few people towards finding out more about EA and becoming involved.