When I was working for EA London in 2018, we also had someone tell us that the free books thing made us look like a cult and they made the comparison with free Bibles.
It’s also a nice nudge for people to read the books (I remember reading Doing Good Better in a couple of weeks because a friend/organiser had lent it to me and I didn’t want to keep him waiting).
I believe that EA could tone down the free books by 5-10% but I am pretty skeptical that the books program is super overboard.
I have 50+ books I’ve gotten at events over the past few years (when I was in college), mostly politics/econ/phil stuff the complete works of John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith, Myth of the Rational Voter, Elephant in the Brain, Three Languages of Politics, etc (all physical books). Bill Gates’ book has been given out as a free PDF recently.
So I don’t think EA is a major outlier here. I also like that there are some slightly less “EA books” in the mix like the Scout Mindset and The AI Does Not Hate You.
I think it’s not free books per se, but free books related to phrases “here’s what’s really important”, “this is how to think about morality” that are problematic in the context of the Bible comparison
I’m not sure what campus EA practices are like—but, in between pamphlets and books, there are zines. Low-budget, high-nonconformity, high-persuasion. Easy for students to write their own, or make personal variations, instead of treating like official doctrine. ie, https://azinelibrary.org/zines/
Nice. And when it comes to links, ~half the time I’ll send someone a link to the Wikipedia page on EA or longtermism rather than something written internally.
When I was working for EA London in 2018, we also had someone tell us that the free books thing made us look like a cult and they made the comparison with free Bibles.
One option here could be to lend books instead. Some advantages:
Implies that when you’re done reading the book you don’t need it anymore, as opposed to a religious text which you keep and reference.
While the distributors won’t get all the books back (and that’s fine) the books they do get back they can lend out again.
Less lavish, both in appearance and in reality.
This is what we do at our meetups in Boston.
It’s also a nice nudge for people to read the books (I remember reading Doing Good Better in a couple of weeks because a friend/organiser had lent it to me and I didn’t want to keep him waiting).
I believe that EA could tone down the free books by 5-10% but I am pretty skeptical that the books program is super overboard.
I have 50+ books I’ve gotten at events over the past few years (when I was in college), mostly politics/econ/phil stuff the complete works of John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith, Myth of the Rational Voter, Elephant in the Brain, Three Languages of Politics, etc (all physical books). Bill Gates’ book has been given out as a free PDF recently.
So I don’t think EA is a major outlier here. I also like that there are some slightly less “EA books” in the mix like the Scout Mindset and The AI Does Not Hate You.
I think it’s not free books per se, but free books related to phrases “here’s what’s really important”, “this is how to think about morality” that are problematic in the context of the Bible comparison
I’m not sure what campus EA practices are like—but, in between pamphlets and books, there are zines. Low-budget, high-nonconformity, high-persuasion. Easy for students to write their own, or make personal variations, instead of treating like official doctrine. ie, https://azinelibrary.org/zines/
Nice. And when it comes to links, ~half the time I’ll send someone a link to the Wikipedia page on EA or longtermism rather than something written internally.