It seems like this depends very, very heavily upon the actual person. I think the range of “when would it be best for a particular person to learn about EA” could be anywhere from, like, 10 (I imagine Eliezer) all the way up to old age for a small number of people, although the distribution seems like it hits a peak somewhere in the 14-25 range because that’s when people have both critical thinking abilities and the ability to change their mind about important things.
That being said, if your goal is to get people who are going to make major contributions to the world in the future, it seems to me that that subgroup is pretty heavily correlated with “people who would have been interested in EA in high school, if only they had known about it.” This post seems to agree. Younger than that, and I think only a very very tiny portion of the population can keep up with the ideas (and I have some concerns about trying to influence the minds of, like, the vast majority of 12 year olds); older, and they’ve lost idea-flexibility and are more set in their ways.
The age group you’re targeting seems fine if slightly young, although the way you describe your specific outreach method pattern-matches to a concerning one in my mind, and I’d potentially encourage you to consider the asymmetric arguments for why the type of outreach you’re currently doing is fine/not fine. If you can cheaply take steps to target a slightly older audience, that seems good.
I don’t have a great answer, but I just wanted to mention that this is something we (Rethink Priotities) have thought about and will probably come back to in analysing the many years of data from the EA survey. Because people are not experimentally aside an age to learn about this, it will be hard to make strong causal inference is. Still I suspect that data will lead to more insight than the absence of data. Also, everyone is playing a very long game, note that orgs/projects like Charity Elections are introducing EA ideas in high schools and could possibly do some exogenous assignment/randomisation.
I don’t see the moral problem with trying to inspire young people to learn about something you believe is important. If you’re trying to inspire them to learn about the wrong things, then I think that could be bad because the things are wrong. But at least if there are multiple groups doing this, then it teaches them that there are multiple perspectives on the world sooner rather than later, and that seems good.
Also, thanks for linking the post! This is very usefwl.
It seems like this depends very, very heavily upon the actual person. I think the range of “when would it be best for a particular person to learn about EA” could be anywhere from, like, 10 (I imagine Eliezer) all the way up to old age for a small number of people, although the distribution seems like it hits a peak somewhere in the 14-25 range because that’s when people have both critical thinking abilities and the ability to change their mind about important things.
That being said, if your goal is to get people who are going to make major contributions to the world in the future, it seems to me that that subgroup is pretty heavily correlated with “people who would have been interested in EA in high school, if only they had known about it.” This post seems to agree. Younger than that, and I think only a very very tiny portion of the population can keep up with the ideas (and I have some concerns about trying to influence the minds of, like, the vast majority of 12 year olds); older, and they’ve lost idea-flexibility and are more set in their ways.
The age group you’re targeting seems fine if slightly young, although the way you describe your specific outreach method pattern-matches to a concerning one in my mind, and I’d potentially encourage you to consider the asymmetric arguments for why the type of outreach you’re currently doing is fine/not fine. If you can cheaply take steps to target a slightly older audience, that seems good.
I don’t have a great answer, but I just wanted to mention that this is something we (Rethink Priotities) have thought about and will probably come back to in analysing the many years of data from the EA survey. Because people are not experimentally aside an age to learn about this, it will be hard to make strong causal inference is. Still I suspect that data will lead to more insight than the absence of data. Also, everyone is playing a very long game, note that orgs/projects like Charity Elections are introducing EA ideas in high schools and could possibly do some exogenous assignment/randomisation.
I don’t see the moral problem with trying to inspire young people to learn about something you believe is important. If you’re trying to inspire them to learn about the wrong things, then I think that could be bad because the things are wrong. But at least if there are multiple groups doing this, then it teaches them that there are multiple perspectives on the world sooner rather than later, and that seems good.
Also, thanks for linking the post! This is very usefwl.