Signaling with Small Orange Diamonds
There are so many important efforts to make the world better that are significantly limited by funding, and it would be great if we could have a culture where significant and thoughtful giving was normal and common. It’s hard to build that sort of norm if people keep their giving private, however, and so I’ve long been an advocate of being public about your giving. I list my donations (jointly with Julia) and have taken Giving What We Can’s 10% Pledge (also jointly with Julia).
In July GWWC suggested people put the “small orange diamond” symbol (🔸) in their usernames on social media to show that they’ve pledged. Here’s how the EA Forum describes this on the profile editing page:
This digital symbol reminds me of the physical Symbolic Beads of Raikoth. In an older Scott Alexander post he talked about how his fictional society attempted to redirect humanity’s natural competitive status-signaling in a more productive direction than yachts. The symbol also has something in common with wedding rings, showing that you have taken on a serious commitment. To the extent that it helps promote a norm of substantial and effective giving, that seems pretty good!
And yet despite being on the board of GWWC USA I haven’t put it in my username, even on the EA Forum where it would be most relevant. I’m not sure if this is the right call, but some things pushing me in this direction:
Usernames with symbols in them feel like they’re signaling something I don’t want to signal, just by the inclusion of emoji. Something like “I’m a very online person who keeps up with fast-moving discourse”.
Relatedly, it feels like this is not what the username field is for. If I’m interacting with someone on some topic unrelated to my advocacy it feels intrusive and uncooperative to be bringing it into the conversation.
While effective giving is one thing I would like to see more of, this is really a large category. I could see including symbols showing that I’m an advocate for allowing people to build housing, giving kids more independence, applying your career effectively, increasing immigration, etc. But I don’t want to be “Jeff Kaufman 🔸🏗👣🛝💡🌎”.
For now I’ve decided I will go ahead and add this to my name on the EA Forum where it’s most relevant and I most understand how it will be perceived, but I won’t add it to my username elsewhere. If you’d like to try to convince me to do otherwise, please go ahead!
My position is quite the opposite: I put the symbol on my LinkedIn profile (and removed it from the URL) and WhatsApp profile.
I never dared to start a discussion about effective giving myself, but thanks to this, people around me started the discussion for me (“Oh, what does this emoji means btw? What’s the 10% pledge?”). I’ve been impressed at how curious, supportive and positive people were, and didn’t feel like proselytizing anything while doing so, merely answering their curiosity. And I’m speaking as someone who went as far as hiding my signing the pledge to my non-EA surrounding up until that point.
I don’t think anyone one the EA Forum would get interested in effective giving through this, and I actually don’t support targeting EAs first -I’d consider it a better outcome if people outside the community see the emoji as opposed as within the community. I think that EA has to be very outward facing, or it will fail.
I don’t think of putting a small orange diamond only in my EA Forum username as targeting EAs first, but instead that I want to communicate differently with different audiences?
On the Forum mostly people know what the diamond is, and putting it in my username helps communicate that pledging is normal and common.
Elsewhere, I think it would work more as you describe, as a potential conversation starter and an opportunity to introduce people to effective giving. But because of the downsides I describe in the post, in other environments I prefer to do this in words. This also works better as I advocate for more different things: I can write some posts advocating effective giving, other posts advocating letting people build more housing, etc.
I do think that if I were more shy and less willing to discuss effective giving (and if I didn’t have a range of other things I was advocating for) putting a diamond in my general social media profiles would make more sense.
(copying my comment from Jeff’s Facebook post of this)
I agree with this and didn’t add it (the orange diamond or 10%) anywhere when I first saw the suggestions/asks by GWWC to do so for largely the same reasons as you.
I then added added it to my Manifold Markets *profile* (not name field) after seeing another user had done so. I didn’t know who the user was and didn’t know that they had any affiliation with effective giving or EA, and appreciated learning that, hence why I decided to do the same. I’m not committed to this at all and may remove it in the future. https://manifold.markets/WilliamKiely
I have not added it to my EA Forum name or profile. Everyone on the EA Forum knows that a lot of people there engage in effective giving, with a substantial percentage giving 10% or more. And unlike the Manifold Markets case where it was a pleasant surprise to learn that a person gives 10+% (where presumably a much lower percentage of people do than the EA Forum), I don’t particularly care to know whether a person on he EA Forum does effective giving or not. I also kind of want to avoid actively proselytizing for it on the EA Forum, since for a lot of people trying to save money and focus on finding direct work instead may be a more valuable path than giving a mere 10% of a typical income at the expense of saving faster.
I have not added it anywhere else besides my Manifold Markets profile as far as I recall.
Personally, I find the idea somewhat odd/uncomfortable, but also vaguely buy the impact case, so I’ve only added it on LinkedIn, as that’s the social network where I feel like the norm is shameless signalling and where I tie it least to my identity—I may as well virtue signal rather than just bragging!
Honestly it seems kind of weird that on the EA Forum there isn’t just a checkbox for this.
I’d be very surprised if the downside of the initiative were significant in any way, but it seems like the upside potential is quite high, so I’ve included it in all of my social media.
If you perceive any sort of downside from it, you can always remove it again.
Aren’t most of the downsides and upsides to norms hard to reverse (almost by definition)? Maybe you don’t think the upside is in getting other people to also participate in using the signal—but my read of the OP thinks that this is mostly about creating norms.
The only problem is that no one knows what this means. Something easy would be to enter the definition on Urban Dictionary. I tried, but I am having server issues right now.
Just on this point:
I think this argument might have a lot of power among folks who tend to think of social norms in quite explicit/analytical terms, and who put a lot of emphasis on being cooperative. But I suspect relatively few people will see this as uncooperative/intrusive, because the pin and the idea it’s advocating are pretty non-offensive.
I personally think of it similarly to wearing my pledge pin irl. I don’t use emojis to signal anything else.
Imo I’d only really push you to add it on LinkedIn:
Users are often wealthy or status seeking people doing business development work
LinkedIn is a reasonable place to signal association with a particular brand ie. Giving What We Can.
If you’ve got an impressive / high status CV then that adds credibility to GWWC
It is a marketing to a more risk averse segment and signalling that this is already a movement with momentum
It makes it less cringe for future pledgers to add the emoji and perhaps do further advocacy for effective giving
Emojis in display names feels like a Twitter-native phenomenon. I think it works on Twitter because of the distinction between a @username and a Twitter handle: the latter can change frequently and is often used for jokes or puns anyway.
So the orange diamond emoji fits in well on Twitter—even “Jeff Kaufman 🔸🏗👣🛝💡🌎”, while a little over the top, wouldn’t strike me as too unusual. But in most other settings (EA Forum, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc), where there’s less or no distinction between real names, usernames, and display names, an emoji stands out more. (Although 🔸 is visually simpler and more professional-looking than 🛝, at least.)
A candidate rule of thumb: use the 🔸 in situations where you’re fine with people using other emojis, and don’t use it if it might start a slippery slope toward 🔸🏗👣🛝💡🌎 where that would be unwelcome. For me that means … just Twitter, I think? And maybe the EA forum where it’s already catching on and doesn’t seem to be spurring other emoji-use.
Personally, I’ve added the diamond in my LinkedIn, Forum and local EA slack profile.
People on LinkedIn can check my description if they are curious about it.
Haven’t noticed any downside yet (although it would be hard to know).
It’s just that I feel like the culture of not showing our donations is not a good thing. It leads us to think nobody else donates, so we donate much less than we would have done otherwise. So it’s worth signaling that yes, people are donating.