This is a good question with no clear answer. Overall, I tend to be more of a pro-marketing person than what I perceive as the EA average.
However, I think there are a few good reasons to lean in the direction of “keeping more nuance and epistemic humility” that we might underappreciate (given the more obvious benefits of the other approach):
Many of the world’s most successful/thoughtful people will be unusually attracted to movements that are more nuanced and humble. For example, I wouldn’t be surprised if Dustin Moskovitz were drawn to GiveWell partly because they weren’t as “salesy” as other charities (though I don’t know the details of this interaction, so maybe I’m wrong). People with a lot of resources or potential are constantly being approached by people who want to sell them on a new idea; a non-salesy EA could be very appealing in this context.
If some groups within EA try to be more salesy, it could spark internal competition. Right now, I think EA does a pretty good job of being a neutral community, where someone who wants to contribute will get questions like “what are you interested in?”, rather than lots of pitches on particular organizations/causes. If marketing becomes more prevalent, we might lose some of that collaborative atmosphere.
Nuance and humility are also marketable! One type of pitch for EA that I think is undervalued: We are the social movement that values honesty more than any other movement. Political parties lie. Populist movements lie. We don’t lie, even if the truth isn’t exciting.
EA doesn’t actually need giant walls of statistics to market itself. As you noted, the Singer/Lindauer argument doesn’t discuss statistics or prioritization. But it still does a good job of making one of the central arguments of EA, in a way that can be extended to many other causes. Even if this particular empathetic approach wouldn’t work as well for longtermist orgs, pretty much every EA org is driven by a simple moral intuition that can be approached in a simple way, as Singer/Lindauer did with “what if it were your child?”
This is a good question with no clear answer. Overall, I tend to be more of a pro-marketing person than what I perceive as the EA average.
However, I think there are a few good reasons to lean in the direction of “keeping more nuance and epistemic humility” that we might underappreciate (given the more obvious benefits of the other approach):
Many of the world’s most successful/thoughtful people will be unusually attracted to movements that are more nuanced and humble. For example, I wouldn’t be surprised if Dustin Moskovitz were drawn to GiveWell partly because they weren’t as “salesy” as other charities (though I don’t know the details of this interaction, so maybe I’m wrong). People with a lot of resources or potential are constantly being approached by people who want to sell them on a new idea; a non-salesy EA could be very appealing in this context.
If some groups within EA try to be more salesy, it could spark internal competition. Right now, I think EA does a pretty good job of being a neutral community, where someone who wants to contribute will get questions like “what are you interested in?”, rather than lots of pitches on particular organizations/causes. If marketing becomes more prevalent, we might lose some of that collaborative atmosphere.
Nuance and humility are also marketable! One type of pitch for EA that I think is undervalued: We are the social movement that values honesty more than any other movement. Political parties lie. Populist movements lie. We don’t lie, even if the truth isn’t exciting.
EA doesn’t actually need giant walls of statistics to market itself. As you noted, the Singer/Lindauer argument doesn’t discuss statistics or prioritization. But it still does a good job of making one of the central arguments of EA, in a way that can be extended to many other causes. Even if this particular empathetic approach wouldn’t work as well for longtermist orgs, pretty much every EA org is driven by a simple moral intuition that can be approached in a simple way, as Singer/Lindauer did with “what if it were your child?”