I don’t think ‘having a better reputation’ means ‘being cool’.
I think ‘having a better reputation’ means people primarily associating EA with core ideas such as evidence, cost-effectiveness, impact, impartiality, counterfactual thinking (rather than e.g. FTX).
I suspect there are plenty of ‘mission-aligned nerds’ out there who have been put off EA because they first hear about the bad stuff rather than the good stuff (though I also expect the overwhelming majority of ‘mission-aligned nerds’ simply haven’t heard of EA at all).
I’d go further and say that the FTX-ish reputation “EA is where extremely wealthy Silicon Valley nerds brag about their generosity whilst mostly funnelling money to people like them and using it as an avenue for self-promotion” also attracts the wrong sort of people—before there were people complaining about FTX being a scam, there were people complaining about the perceived ease of getting funding by FTX attracting the insincere.
(Other negative EA stereotypes contribute to putting well-intentioned people off, but I’m not sure they actually attract the wrong people)
I don’t think ‘having a better reputation’ means ‘being cool’.
I think ‘having a better reputation’ means people primarily associating EA with core ideas such as evidence, cost-effectiveness, impact, impartiality, counterfactual thinking (rather than e.g. FTX).
I suspect there are plenty of ‘mission-aligned nerds’ out there who have been put off EA because they first hear about the bad stuff rather than the good stuff (though I also expect the overwhelming majority of ‘mission-aligned nerds’ simply haven’t heard of EA at all).
I’d go further and say that the FTX-ish reputation “EA is where extremely wealthy Silicon Valley nerds brag about their generosity whilst mostly funnelling money to people like them and using it as an avenue for self-promotion” also attracts the wrong sort of people—before there were people complaining about FTX being a scam, there were people complaining about the perceived ease of getting funding by FTX attracting the insincere.
(Other negative EA stereotypes contribute to putting well-intentioned people off, but I’m not sure they actually attract the wrong people)