Thank you for writing this. Iām not sure whether I agree or disagree, but it seems like a case well made.
While I do not mean to patronise, as many others will have found this, the one contribution I feel I have to make is an emphasis on how very differently people in the wider public may react to ideas/āarguments that seem entirely reasonable to the typical EA. Close friends of mine, bright and educated people, have passionately defended the following positions to me in the past: -They would rather millions die from preventable diseases than Jeff Bezos donate his entire wealth to curing those diseases if such donation was driven by obnoxious virtue-signalling. The difference made to real people didnāt register in their judgements at all, only motivations. Charitable donation can only be good if done privately without telling anyone.
-It is more important that money be spent on the people it is most costly and difficult to help than those whose problems can be cured cheaply because otherwise the people with expensive problems will never be helped.
-Charity should be something that everyone can agree on, and thus any charity dedicated to farmed animal welfare is not a valid donation opportunity.
-The Future of Humanity Institute shouldnāt exist and people there donāt have real jobs. I didnāt even get to explaining what FHI is trying to do or what their research covers; from the name alone they concluded that discussion of how humanityās future might go should be considered an intellectual interest for some people, but not a career. They would not be swayed.
Primarily, I think the āso what?ā of this is trying to communicate EA ideas, nuanced or not, to the wider public is almost certainly going to be met with backlash. The first two anecdotes I list imply that even āIt is better to help more people than fewer people.ā is contentious. Sadly, I donāt think most of what this community supports fits into the āselfless person deserving praiseā category many people have, and calling ourselves Effective Altruists sounds like weāve ascribed ourselves virtues without justification that a person on the street would acknowledge.
Accepting some people will react negatively and this is beyond our control, my humble recommendation would be for any more direct attempt to communicate ideas to the public gets substantial feedback beforehand from people in walks of life very different to the EA norm. People are really surprising.
Iām not surprised people with those sorts of views exist, but to some degree Iād expect them to diminish with familiarity. Itās easier to sneer at things when you donāt have multiple friends openly doing or supporting them.
Thereās also a question of how much harm comes from such people hearing more about EA, even assuming they donāt change or just reinforce their views. It seems unlikely theyād have been won over by a slower, more guarded approach, so the question would probably be something like āare those people likely to become more proactively anti EA such that they turn people away from making effective donations on net, despite the greater discussion around the idea of doing so?ā That certainly seems possible, but nonetheless I would bet at pretty good odds against it.
Writing this, it occurs to me that one effect of a more open media policy might be to blur the lines further between EA as āa social movementā and EA as āa certain way of donating money, that loads of people do without getting engagedā. That again is plausibly bad, but I would bet on being net good.
The first point here seems very likely true. As for the second, I suspect youāre mostly right but thereās a little more to it. The first of the people I quote in my comment was eventually persuaded to respect my views on altruism, after discussing the philosophy surrounding it almost every night for about three months. I donāt think shorter timespans could have been successful in this regard. He has not joined the EA community in any way, but kind of gets what itās about and thinks itās basically a good thing. If his first contact with the community he had was hearing someone express that they donate 10% of their income or try to do as much good as possible, his response in NATO phonetics could be abbreviated to Foxtrot-Oscar.
In the slow, personal, deliberate induction format, my friend ended up with a respectful stance. Through any less personal or nuanced medium, Iām confident he would have thought of the community only with resentment. Of course, thereās no counterfactual of him donating or doing EA-aligned work so this has not been lost. The harm I see from this is a general souring of how Joe and Jane Public respond to someone identifying as an EA. Thus far, most peopleās experience will be their friends and family hadnāt heard of it, donāt have a strong opinion and, if theyāre not interested, live and let live. I caveat the next sentence with this being a system 1 intuition, but I fear that thereās only so much of the general public who can hear about EA and react negatively before admitting to being in the community becomes an outright uncool thing, that many would be reluctant to voice. Putting the number-crunching for how that would affect total impact aside, it would be a horrible experience for all of us. I donāt think you need a population thatās proactively anti-EA for this to happen, a mere passive dislike is likely sufficient.
Thank you for writing this. Iām not sure whether I agree or disagree, but it seems like a case well made.
While I do not mean to patronise, as many others will have found this, the one contribution I feel I have to make is an emphasis on how very differently people in the wider public may react to ideas/āarguments that seem entirely reasonable to the typical EA. Close friends of mine, bright and educated people, have passionately defended the following positions to me in the past:
-They would rather millions die from preventable diseases than Jeff Bezos donate his entire wealth to curing those diseases if such donation was driven by obnoxious virtue-signalling. The difference made to real people didnāt register in their judgements at all, only motivations. Charitable donation can only be good if done privately without telling anyone.
-It is more important that money be spent on the people it is most costly and difficult to help than those whose problems can be cured cheaply because otherwise the people with expensive problems will never be helped.
-Charity should be something that everyone can agree on, and thus any charity dedicated to farmed animal welfare is not a valid donation opportunity.
-The Future of Humanity Institute shouldnāt exist and people there donāt have real jobs. I didnāt even get to explaining what FHI is trying to do or what their research covers; from the name alone they concluded that discussion of how humanityās future might go should be considered an intellectual interest for some people, but not a career. They would not be swayed.
Primarily, I think the āso what?ā of this is trying to communicate EA ideas, nuanced or not, to the wider public is almost certainly going to be met with backlash. The first two anecdotes I list imply that even āIt is better to help more people than fewer people.ā is contentious. Sadly, I donāt think most of what this community supports fits into the āselfless person deserving praiseā category many people have, and calling ourselves Effective Altruists sounds like weāve ascribed ourselves virtues without justification that a person on the street would acknowledge.
Accepting some people will react negatively and this is beyond our control, my humble recommendation would be for any more direct attempt to communicate ideas to the public gets substantial feedback beforehand from people in walks of life very different to the EA norm. People are really surprising.
Iām not surprised people with those sorts of views exist, but to some degree Iād expect them to diminish with familiarity. Itās easier to sneer at things when you donāt have multiple friends openly doing or supporting them.
Thereās also a question of how much harm comes from such people hearing more about EA, even assuming they donāt change or just reinforce their views. It seems unlikely theyād have been won over by a slower, more guarded approach, so the question would probably be something like āare those people likely to become more proactively anti EA such that they turn people away from making effective donations on net, despite the greater discussion around the idea of doing so?ā That certainly seems possible, but nonetheless I would bet at pretty good odds against it.
Writing this, it occurs to me that one effect of a more open media policy might be to blur the lines further between EA as āa social movementā and EA as āa certain way of donating money, that loads of people do without getting engagedā. That again is plausibly bad, but I would bet on being net good.
The first point here seems very likely true. As for the second, I suspect youāre mostly right but thereās a little more to it. The first of the people I quote in my comment was eventually persuaded to respect my views on altruism, after discussing the philosophy surrounding it almost every night for about three months. I donāt think shorter timespans could have been successful in this regard. He has not joined the EA community in any way, but kind of gets what itās about and thinks itās basically a good thing. If his first contact with the community he had was hearing someone express that they donate 10% of their income or try to do as much good as possible, his response in NATO phonetics could be abbreviated to Foxtrot-Oscar.
In the slow, personal, deliberate induction format, my friend ended up with a respectful stance. Through any less personal or nuanced medium, Iām confident he would have thought of the community only with resentment. Of course, thereās no counterfactual of him donating or doing EA-aligned work so this has not been lost. The harm I see from this is a general souring of how Joe and Jane Public respond to someone identifying as an EA. Thus far, most peopleās experience will be their friends and family hadnāt heard of it, donāt have a strong opinion and, if theyāre not interested, live and let live. I caveat the next sentence with this being a system 1 intuition, but I fear that thereās only so much of the general public who can hear about EA and react negatively before admitting to being in the community becomes an outright uncool thing, that many would be reluctant to voice. Putting the number-crunching for how that would affect total impact aside, it would be a horrible experience for all of us. I donāt think you need a population thatās proactively anti-EA for this to happen, a mere passive dislike is likely sufficient.