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.
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.