I’m not surprised people with those sorts of views exist, but to some degree I’d expect them to diminish with familiarity. It’s easier to sneer at things when you don’t have multiple friends openly doing or supporting them.
There’s also a question of how much harm comes from such people hearing more about EA, even assuming they don’t change or just reinforce their views. It seems unlikely they’d have been won over by a slower, more guarded approach, so the question would probably be something like ‘are 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?’ 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 ‘a social movement’ and EA as ‘a certain way of donating money, that loads of people do without getting engaged’. 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 you’re mostly right but there’s 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 don’t 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 it’s about and thinks it’s 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, I’m confident he would have thought of the community only with resentment. Of course, there’s 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 people’s experience will be their friends and family hadn’t heard of it, don’t have a strong opinion and, if they’re not interested, live and let live. I caveat the next sentence with this being a system 1 intuition, but I fear that there’s 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 don’t think you need a population that’s proactively anti-EA for this to happen, a mere passive dislike is likely sufficient.
I’m not surprised people with those sorts of views exist, but to some degree I’d expect them to diminish with familiarity. It’s easier to sneer at things when you don’t have multiple friends openly doing or supporting them.
There’s also a question of how much harm comes from such people hearing more about EA, even assuming they don’t change or just reinforce their views. It seems unlikely they’d have been won over by a slower, more guarded approach, so the question would probably be something like ‘are 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?’ 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 ‘a social movement’ and EA as ‘a certain way of donating money, that loads of people do without getting engaged’. 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 you’re mostly right but there’s 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 don’t 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 it’s about and thinks it’s 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, I’m confident he would have thought of the community only with resentment. Of course, there’s 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 people’s experience will be their friends and family hadn’t heard of it, don’t have a strong opinion and, if they’re not interested, live and let live. I caveat the next sentence with this being a system 1 intuition, but I fear that there’s 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 don’t think you need a population that’s proactively anti-EA for this to happen, a mere passive dislike is likely sufficient.