Because this comes up when googling street outreach, as President of EA Melbourne (the EA group that ran the above-mentioned event), I’d love to tell you how it went.
Interestingly, people in the public seem open to ideas of effective altruism. However, the conversion rate is truly tiny, no one we saw on that day came to any future event. In the end, we decided that this was not a worthwhile activity.
Some interesting notes however:
People, especially in the current political climate (referring to Russia invading Ukraine here), are actually quite supportive of longtermist ideas! This is probably because longtermist ideas are the only types of problems that people face in developed nations (in comparison to Animal Welfare and Global Health and Development). We ran a giving game between animal welfare, global poverty and longtermist ideas, and the money spread was fairly even.
Almost no one puts any thought into where their money goes, although this may be just because they didn’t want to strike a conversation up with a stranger. Many people followed just what seemed like a good idea, sometimes confusing cause areas (for instance, thinking “Global Health” is about environmentalism, or possibly that “Animal Welfare” is about helping pet animals etc)
As is usual with street outreach, younger people are much more open to discussion.
Because this comes up when googling street outreach, as President of EA Melbourne (the EA group that ran the above-mentioned event), I’d love to tell you how it went.
Interestingly, people in the public seem open to ideas of effective altruism. However, the conversion rate is truly tiny, no one we saw on that day came to any future event. In the end, we decided that this was not a worthwhile activity.
Some interesting notes however:
People, especially in the current political climate (referring to Russia invading Ukraine here), are actually quite supportive of longtermist ideas! This is probably because longtermist ideas are the only types of problems that people face in developed nations (in comparison to Animal Welfare and Global Health and Development). We ran a giving game between animal welfare, global poverty and longtermist ideas, and the money spread was fairly even.
Almost no one puts any thought into where their money goes, although this may be just because they didn’t want to strike a conversation up with a stranger. Many people followed just what seemed like a good idea, sometimes confusing cause areas (for instance, thinking “Global Health” is about environmentalism, or possibly that “Animal Welfare” is about helping pet animals etc)
As is usual with street outreach, younger people are much more open to discussion.