For donations, pay without using a credit card or PayPal so the charity won’t have to pay the 2-3% fee. (Sometimes charities can process credit cards for free, though.) And don’t be shy about letting others know how much you like donating to “top” charities, either! Monkey see, monkey do.
For advocacy:
make more friends and acquaintances. The more people you know, the more you can influence.
Enter more social spheres. To spread things by word of mouth, the more different social spheres you are in, the more it will spread. Even if you talk to the same number of people, those people that you talk to will be talking to different people themselves if they are in different groups/locations. If you stick to one group that you deal with, those people will be more likely just to talk to each other.
Letter writing can be very effective, especially if lots of people do it. Ie. I emailed a coffee and donut chain recently and complained that they don’t have soy milk. If more people complained, they’d have to start carrying it.
Improve your appearance: People are influenced by those that look like them, or are good-looking and successful. Also, appearing to be a happy, well adjusted person would make you a far better advocate. If you come across as weird, unhappy, etc, people will think “I wouldn’t want to be part of any club that would have you as a member,” to paraphrase the old Groucho Marx joke.
For volunteering: if you have a trade or profession that is expensive to employ, that can be very high impact/irreplaceable. Ie. volunteering your accountancy services, or electrical work.
My number one advice for small steps, or what to do when you don’t know what to do for EA, however, is ironically to focus on yourself. Read and watch Youtube videos to educate yourself about whatever topics you feel are most important. Meditate to transcend negative emotions. Cultivate better social skills, or technical skills. As you become more educated on various issues, the manner in which to contribute best will reveal itself. Or you can become more effective at something altruistic you are already doing. Not to mention, if people see that you are educated, they will listen to you more so it greatly improves advocacy.
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.
Nice. Some of mine:
For donations, pay without using a credit card or PayPal so the charity won’t have to pay the 2-3% fee. (Sometimes charities can process credit cards for free, though.) And don’t be shy about letting others know how much you like donating to “top” charities, either! Monkey see, monkey do.
For advocacy:
make more friends and acquaintances. The more people you know, the more you can influence.
Enter more social spheres. To spread things by word of mouth, the more different social spheres you are in, the more it will spread. Even if you talk to the same number of people, those people that you talk to will be talking to different people themselves if they are in different groups/locations. If you stick to one group that you deal with, those people will be more likely just to talk to each other.
Letter writing can be very effective, especially if lots of people do it. Ie. I emailed a coffee and donut chain recently and complained that they don’t have soy milk. If more people complained, they’d have to start carrying it.
Improve your appearance: People are influenced by those that look like them, or are good-looking and successful. Also, appearing to be a happy, well adjusted person would make you a far better advocate. If you come across as weird, unhappy, etc, people will think “I wouldn’t want to be part of any club that would have you as a member,” to paraphrase the old Groucho Marx joke.
For volunteering: if you have a trade or profession that is expensive to employ, that can be very high impact/irreplaceable. Ie. volunteering your accountancy services, or electrical work.
My number one advice for small steps, or what to do when you don’t know what to do for EA, however, is ironically to focus on yourself. Read and watch Youtube videos to educate yourself about whatever topics you feel are most important. Meditate to transcend negative emotions. Cultivate better social skills, or technical skills. As you become more educated on various issues, the manner in which to contribute best will reveal itself. Or you can become more effective at something altruistic you are already doing. Not to mention, if people see that you are educated, they will listen to you more so it greatly improves advocacy.
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.