You make excellent points, Owen. Especially resonant with me was your point about avoiding overly strange-sounding arguments. When faced with threatening ideas, especially those that are very demanding (such as donating a lot to charity), a person will look for any excuse to dismiss them. One of the primary ways people do this is by finding some fault in the person challenging them, such as radicalism. Too often, advocates walk straight into this, making themselves seem like, heck you said it, crackpots. I saw a video of Peter Singer giving a speech about EA recently. He began the speech by praising a number of effective altruists for donating their organs while they’re still alive to whoever may need them. This would be seen as extremely radical by most people. Thus, many of the people in the audience (or watching on Youtube) likely dismissed making large donations to effective charities as also radical, because it’s being proposed by these radical organ-donating people that call themselves “effective altruists”. The focus of my life is promoting vegetarianism as it
is a practice of heinous victimization on a grand scale. It bothers me to see some veg activists publicly declaring that nature or wildlife should be completely eradicated so as to avoid wild animal suffering. To a meat-eater pondering giving up meat to have
compassion for animals, this would seem so absurd and radical that he would have a good chance of dismissing vegetarianism altogether, as it’s proponents are clearly cuckoo. It’s important to come across as reasonable when advocating for something and keep your extremism to yourself. No matter how right you think you are, talking about giving internal organs away, as with Singer’s example, ain’t going to cause a rush at the local hospital for organ transplant volunteers… but it will prevent people from becoming major donors!!
You make excellent points, Owen. Especially resonant with me was your point about avoiding overly strange-sounding arguments. When faced with threatening ideas, especially those that are very demanding (such as donating a lot to charity), a person will look for any excuse to dismiss them. One of the primary ways people do this is by finding some fault in the person challenging them, such as radicalism. Too often, advocates walk straight into this, making themselves seem like, heck you said it, crackpots. I saw a video of Peter Singer giving a speech about EA recently. He began the speech by praising a number of effective altruists for donating their organs while they’re still alive to whoever may need them. This would be seen as extremely radical by most people. Thus, many of the people in the audience (or watching on Youtube) likely dismissed making large donations to effective charities as also radical, because it’s being proposed by these radical organ-donating people that call themselves “effective altruists”. The focus of my life is promoting vegetarianism as it is a practice of heinous victimization on a grand scale. It bothers me to see some veg activists publicly declaring that nature or wildlife should be completely eradicated so as to avoid wild animal suffering. To a meat-eater pondering giving up meat to have compassion for animals, this would seem so absurd and radical that he would have a good chance of dismissing vegetarianism altogether, as it’s proponents are clearly cuckoo. It’s important to come across as reasonable when advocating for something and keep your extremism to yourself. No matter how right you think you are, talking about giving internal organs away, as with Singer’s example, ain’t going to cause a rush at the local hospital for organ transplant volunteers… but it will prevent people from becoming major donors!!