Don’t worry about “preaching to converts” in your Splash class; I very much doubt many of your students will have any familiarity with EA beyond a passing mention somewhere.
Discussing effective tactics for promoting EA would take a long time. If you want to learn about some things other folks have done, check out the EA Hub’s list of resources or the top community posts on the Forum (not everything at that link will be about promotion, but if you skip around you’ll find some relevant articles).
With cause prioritization (and other topics), you’ll probably be fine as long as you avoid negativity. My framing is never “don’t work on X”; instead, it’s (to paraphrase): “what are you hoping to get by working on X? Does it seem to be working? What led you to working on X rather than other things in the same general area?” My overall message is “everyone sees the world a little differently, but for any way you see the world, there will be some strategies for helping that are likely to work out better than others. Cause prioritization is about figuring out the best thing you can be doing, according to your values.”
Prioritization isn’t exclusive to EA: Other entities do it all the time based on their own values (e.g. environmental agencies trying to weigh policies by how they affect the lives of citizens, but not necessarily people in other countries). EA just has fewer limits on the sorts of ideas it considers, and on which beings we care about helping.
(This is a very rough perspective, and belongs to me rather than my employer, but the point of “work with people’s values, don’t tell them to value other things” stands.)
Don’t worry about “preaching to converts” in your Splash class; I very much doubt many of your students will have any familiarity with EA beyond a passing mention somewhere.
Discussing effective tactics for promoting EA would take a long time. If you want to learn about some things other folks have done, check out the EA Hub’s list of resources or the top community posts on the Forum (not everything at that link will be about promotion, but if you skip around you’ll find some relevant articles).
With cause prioritization (and other topics), you’ll probably be fine as long as you avoid negativity. My framing is never “don’t work on X”; instead, it’s (to paraphrase): “what are you hoping to get by working on X? Does it seem to be working? What led you to working on X rather than other things in the same general area?” My overall message is “everyone sees the world a little differently, but for any way you see the world, there will be some strategies for helping that are likely to work out better than others. Cause prioritization is about figuring out the best thing you can be doing, according to your values.”
Prioritization isn’t exclusive to EA: Other entities do it all the time based on their own values (e.g. environmental agencies trying to weigh policies by how they affect the lives of citizens, but not necessarily people in other countries). EA just has fewer limits on the sorts of ideas it considers, and on which beings we care about helping.
(This is a very rough perspective, and belongs to me rather than my employer, but the point of “work with people’s values, don’t tell them to value other things” stands.)