Excellent post. I think that the importance of kindness and generosity is often underestimated. In most communities, movements or workplaces, where yoy are working together towards a shared goal, the interpersonal atmosphere is only discussed if there are serious problems (e.g. open conflicts or hostility). In the absence of that, leaders and others won’t bother too much with how people behave towards each other. However, my hunch is that the positive effects of a better atmosphere do not stop at the point where there is no longer open hostility. On the contrary, movements where people are kind and encouraging in the way you suggest we should be are, I would guess, more effective than those where there is merely an absence of open hostility.
Condor works by sifting through data from Twitter, Facebook and other social media, and using them to predict how a public protest will evolve. It does so by performing what Dr Gloor calls “sentiment analysis” on the data.
Sentiment analysis first classifies protesters by their clout. An influential Twitter user, for instance, is one who has many followers but follows few people himself. His tweets are typically upbeat (containing words or phrases such as “great”, “fun”, “funny”, “good time”, “hilarious movie”, “you’ll love” and so forth), are rapidly retweeted, and appear to sway others. In a nod to the methods developed by Google, Dr Gloor refers to this process as “PageRanking for people”.
Having thus ranked protesters, Condor then follows those at the top of the list to see how their output changes. Dr Gloor has found that, in Western countries at least, non-violent protest movements begin to burn out when the upbeat tweets turn negative, with “not”, “never”, “lame”, “I hate”, “idiot” and so on becoming more frequent. Abundant complaints about idiots in the government or in an ideologically opposed group are a good signal of a movement’s decline. Complaints about idiots in one’s own movement or such infelicities as the theft of beer by a fellow demonstrator suggest the whole thing is almost over.
Perhaps we could let Condor analyze this forum, to see if we use a sufficient number of upbeat phrases...
Nice quote, and very relevant—thanks for sharing! A general worry is that EA is often framed as inherently critical—as being sceptical of typical ways of doing good, as debunking and criticising ineffective attempts at altruism etc. - and this will mean we naturally end up using a lot of negative words.
I think there’s some evidence that being critical outside of a group can make people within the group feel closer to each other—which makes sense, because it strengthens the feeling of “us” versus “them.” But doing this with EA seems actively harmful, both because we want to attract as many people to be part of the “group” as possible, and because it’s unclear exactly where the line of the “group” lies, so we inevitably end up being critical of each other too.
Excellent post. I think that the importance of kindness and generosity is often underestimated. In most communities, movements or workplaces, where yoy are working together towards a shared goal, the interpersonal atmosphere is only discussed if there are serious problems (e.g. open conflicts or hostility). In the absence of that, leaders and others won’t bother too much with how people behave towards each other. However, my hunch is that the positive effects of a better atmosphere do not stop at the point where there is no longer open hostility. On the contrary, movements where people are kind and encouraging in the way you suggest we should be are, I would guess, more effective than those where there is merely an absence of open hostility.
The following quote from The Economist sheds some light on these matters:
Perhaps we could let Condor analyze this forum, to see if we use a sufficient number of upbeat phrases...
Nice quote, and very relevant—thanks for sharing! A general worry is that EA is often framed as inherently critical—as being sceptical of typical ways of doing good, as debunking and criticising ineffective attempts at altruism etc. - and this will mean we naturally end up using a lot of negative words.
I think there’s some evidence that being critical outside of a group can make people within the group feel closer to each other—which makes sense, because it strengthens the feeling of “us” versus “them.” But doing this with EA seems actively harmful, both because we want to attract as many people to be part of the “group” as possible, and because it’s unclear exactly where the line of the “group” lies, so we inevitably end up being critical of each other too.