This is a tricky subject, because people who would be willing to use this kind of content on themselves are probably people who already have a lot of good EA habits (though maybe said content could help with general motivation).
More interesting to me is content that can help get people over the line of starting to have good charitable habits in the first place. Which video about veganism or effective giving is really most convincing? Is it better to start with the Drowning Child argument, or something less abstract?
Personally, the most motivating content experiences I can remember from my pre-EA days were:
a) Watching Life in a Day, the YouTube-produced documentary about how people live out a day all around the world. Gave me a deep appreciation for my place in the human species in a way no other piece of media has equaled.
b) Reading a critical report on a charity I had supported and realizing that I hadn’t really thought carefully about their work; hence, my money had gone to waste (and worse, I’d solicited money from relatives that had also likely gone to waste). This experience is part of why I paid such careful attention to GiveWell when I first heard about it.
Yea, I think so too. If you have the motivation to look at a video of factory farming before entering the supermarket every time, you likely also have the motivation to just buy what you really want to buy anyway. So it would be more effective if the content is presented automatically through smartphone notifications, background images on your laptop, printed out versions around your house, etc. In any case, it could be the critical extra push for some people.
Figuring out how best/​most convincingly to convey the basic EA arguments around expansion of our moral circle, realities of income distributions around the globe, disparities in effectiveness among charities etc, is also an important topic. Doing Good Better as a whole did a great job for me.
This is a tricky subject, because people who would be willing to use this kind of content on themselves are probably people who already have a lot of good EA habits (though maybe said content could help with general motivation).
More interesting to me is content that can help get people over the line of starting to have good charitable habits in the first place. Which video about veganism or effective giving is really most convincing? Is it better to start with the Drowning Child argument, or something less abstract?
Personally, the most motivating content experiences I can remember from my pre-EA days were:
a) Watching Life in a Day, the YouTube-produced documentary about how people live out a day all around the world. Gave me a deep appreciation for my place in the human species in a way no other piece of media has equaled.
b) Reading a critical report on a charity I had supported and realizing that I hadn’t really thought carefully about their work; hence, my money had gone to waste (and worse, I’d solicited money from relatives that had also likely gone to waste). This experience is part of why I paid such careful attention to GiveWell when I first heard about it.
Yea, I think so too. If you have the motivation to look at a video of factory farming before entering the supermarket every time, you likely also have the motivation to just buy what you really want to buy anyway. So it would be more effective if the content is presented automatically through smartphone notifications, background images on your laptop, printed out versions around your house, etc. In any case, it could be the critical extra push for some people.
Figuring out how best/​most convincingly to convey the basic EA arguments around expansion of our moral circle, realities of income distributions around the globe, disparities in effectiveness among charities etc, is also an important topic. Doing Good Better as a whole did a great job for me.