Yeah, I think many groups struggle with the exact boundary between “marketing” and “deception”. Though EAs are in general very truthful, different EAs will still differ both in where they put that boundary and their actual evaluation of climate change, so their final evaluation of the morality of devoting more attention to climate change for marketing purposes will differ quite a lot.
I was arguing elsewhere in this post for more of a strict “say what you believe” policy, but out of curiosity, would you still have that reaction (to the gateway/PR argument) if the EA in question thought that climate change thought was, like, pretty good, not the top cause, but decent? To me that seems a lot more ethical and a lot less patronising.
Thanks for the question as it caused me to reflect. I think it is bad to intentionally misrepresent your views in order to appeal to a broader audience, with the express intention of changing their views once you have them listening to you and/or involved in your group. I don’t think this tactic necessarily becomes less bad based on the degree of misrepresentation involved. I would call this deceptive recruiting. It’s manipulative and violates trust. To be clear, I am not accusing anyone of actually doing this, but the idea seems to come up often when “outsiders” (for lack of a better term) are discussed.
Yeah, I think many groups struggle with the exact boundary between “marketing” and “deception”. Though EAs are in general very truthful, different EAs will still differ both in where they put that boundary and their actual evaluation of climate change, so their final evaluation of the morality of devoting more attention to climate change for marketing purposes will differ quite a lot.
I was arguing elsewhere in this post for more of a strict “say what you believe” policy, but out of curiosity, would you still have that reaction (to the gateway/PR argument) if the EA in question thought that climate change thought was, like, pretty good, not the top cause, but decent? To me that seems a lot more ethical and a lot less patronising.
Thanks for the question as it caused me to reflect. I think it is bad to intentionally misrepresent your views in order to appeal to a broader audience, with the express intention of changing their views once you have them listening to you and/or involved in your group. I don’t think this tactic necessarily becomes less bad based on the degree of misrepresentation involved. I would call this deceptive recruiting. It’s manipulative and violates trust. To be clear, I am not accusing anyone of actually doing this, but the idea seems to come up often when “outsiders” (for lack of a better term) are discussed.