I’m broadly on board with the points made here, but I would prefer to frame this as an addition to the pitch playbook, not a tweak to “the pitch”.
Different people do need to hear different things. Some people probably do have the intuition that we should care about future people, and would react negatively to something like MacAskill’s bottle example. But personally, I find that lots of people do react to longtermism with something like “why worry about the future when there are so many problems now?”, and I think the bottle example might be a helpful intuition pump for those people.
The more I think about EA pitches the more I wonder if anyone has just done focus group testing or something...
I’m broadly on board with the points made here, but I would prefer to frame this as an addition to the pitch playbook, not a tweak to “the pitch”.
Different people do need to hear different things. Some people probably do have the intuition that we should care about future people, and would react negatively to something like MacAskill’s bottle example. But personally, I find that lots of people do react to longtermism with something like “why worry about the future when there are so many problems now?”, and I think the bottle example might be a helpful intuition pump for those people.
The more I think about EA pitches the more I wonder if anyone has just done focus group testing or something...
Agree :)