How Important do you think appearing as not-weird and well adjusted is to our advocacy efforts?
EA’s are known to do some crazy stuff to maximise their impact and I wonder, even if that stuff maximizes their personal impact does it reduce their overall impact by undermining their advocacy.
Basically how significant is the “i wouldn’t want to be part of any club that would have you as a member’ effect?
I don’t think the importance of image in advocacy can be overstated. From what I’ve learned about vegetarian promotion and from my own observations in life, people don’t judge things by their merits, they judge them in terms of how cool they are (ie. How much acceptance it has received from others) or how congruent they are with their existing self-image/worldview.
I don’t think that a person can do “too much” to help others, even if others see it as extremist. I just think that people should keep quiet about actions/beliefs of theirs that could have a negative effect if other people found out about it.
Of course nothing is ever cut and dry. There’s always the possibility that others will come around. For instance, people may at first feel threatened by someone who is making too big a sacrifice – let’s say not having a child so as not to contribute to overpopulation, but then later come to think of it as a good thing once they get accustomed to the idea.
I think we can apply common sense to this question. If you want to appear as a mainstream advocate or fundraiser, and you’re staking your reputation on a few unpopular positions, like animal rights or existential risk reduction, then you should be willing to make some compromises in other areas, like your clothes, hairstyle and conversational manner. Also, you might want to remain apolitical. For example, Jaan Tallinn, who founded the file-sharing program Kazaa, doesn’t discuss the politics of file-sharing these days, instead focussing on his core business of mitigating existential risk. In contrast, if you want to be a contrarian academic leader like Robin Hanson, then you can talk about anything in order to get attention. This path seems riskier though, as it’s much easier to detect whether your personal reputation is growing than to detect whether you are having small detrimental reputational effects diffused over hundreds of other effective altruists.
The other thing that I would say is that if you think X is probably very important yet unpopular, and you think that it’s best not to advocate X in order to preserve your popularity, this is usually a rationalisation. Because if you want to preserve your popularity while promoting X, it will probably be best to attempt to do so right away. Promoting Y instead will not help with the very important end goal.
How Important do you think appearing as not-weird and well adjusted is to our advocacy efforts?
EA’s are known to do some crazy stuff to maximise their impact and I wonder, even if that stuff maximizes their personal impact does it reduce their overall impact by undermining their advocacy.
Basically how significant is the “i wouldn’t want to be part of any club that would have you as a member’ effect?
I don’t think the importance of image in advocacy can be overstated. From what I’ve learned about vegetarian promotion and from my own observations in life, people don’t judge things by their merits, they judge them in terms of how cool they are (ie. How much acceptance it has received from others) or how congruent they are with their existing self-image/worldview.
I don’t think that a person can do “too much” to help others, even if others see it as extremist. I just think that people should keep quiet about actions/beliefs of theirs that could have a negative effect if other people found out about it.
Of course nothing is ever cut and dry. There’s always the possibility that others will come around. For instance, people may at first feel threatened by someone who is making too big a sacrifice – let’s say not having a child so as not to contribute to overpopulation, but then later come to think of it as a good thing once they get accustomed to the idea.
There is no overpopulation. Let’s at least not use such myths to falsely frame decisions as altruistic sacrifice.
I think we can apply common sense to this question. If you want to appear as a mainstream advocate or fundraiser, and you’re staking your reputation on a few unpopular positions, like animal rights or existential risk reduction, then you should be willing to make some compromises in other areas, like your clothes, hairstyle and conversational manner. Also, you might want to remain apolitical. For example, Jaan Tallinn, who founded the file-sharing program Kazaa, doesn’t discuss the politics of file-sharing these days, instead focussing on his core business of mitigating existential risk. In contrast, if you want to be a contrarian academic leader like Robin Hanson, then you can talk about anything in order to get attention. This path seems riskier though, as it’s much easier to detect whether your personal reputation is growing than to detect whether you are having small detrimental reputational effects diffused over hundreds of other effective altruists.
The other thing that I would say is that if you think X is probably very important yet unpopular, and you think that it’s best not to advocate X in order to preserve your popularity, this is usually a rationalisation. Because if you want to preserve your popularity while promoting X, it will probably be best to attempt to do so right away. Promoting Y instead will not help with the very important end goal.