Previous to my 15+ years as an international educator presenting chiefly English Language and Literature in Germany and Wales, I held a range of roles in editing, writing and project management, mostly in line with education and some in the philanthropic realm, in Chicago, Seattle and NYC. Highlights include serving as editor-in-chief an annual magazine for Earth Day Chicago, editing technical articles for Microsoft, and producing (product managing) award-winning educational software for Edmark. I also worked as a copywriter at a German high-tech industrial ad agency for some time.
Since 2019 I have been pursuing a career shift into a communications, outreach, PR, movement-building or related role in or near the EA space. (If it involves education, so much the better.) This effort eventually bore some tasty fruit: I am now communications lead (PT) for the Charity Elections program, a project cultivated by Giving What We Can. I am also Philanthropy Officer for The Life You Can Save. I continue to seek an additional part-time role, as both of these are PT.
Current interests related to EA include deepening my understanding of various areas of EA including longtermism and cause prioritization, exploring and developing the stories we use to bring EA to a wider audience, and looking at current thinking around the application of EA approaches and ideas in educational contexts and the working world.
I’m also a sometime volunteer editor for various EA organizations and Kiva.org, recently served on the Comms Team for High Impact Professionals, occasional editor for The Unjournal, and an amateur songwriter (www.lyricist.net) with musical theatre cred in the form of a Tisch MFA and various readings in Chicago and NYC. I’ve got one nice blog entry up for Giving What We Can. Meanwhile, writing and editing stuff can be glimpsed at www.adamedit.com.
[This is my first real Forum post; please have pity, folks, ’specially if I spend time on something self-evident. :-) ]
This is such an important post, and timely as new charities arising from EA turn ever more outwards to engage the public. Gidon, it’s like you’ve been IN MY BRAIN, because I have been pondering a number of these issues for months, as some of my EA contacts can attest. I appreciate how clearly you have explained the issues and your conclusions.
In a conversation to today with Jack Lewars at One for the World, I concurred with his observation of the abundance of long, detailed explanations of EA that are available, and the lack of more accessible resources. Someone orienting to EA may well find this daunting: Plenty of six-hour podcasts, or articles that begin with the note that they are a 30-plus-minute read, or much longer, like when they include 95 pages of thoughtful comments. (Jack said something to the effect of, “I’ve had good night’s sleeps that were shorter than reading some of these articles.) Not to mention dozens of specialized Forums and Slacks devoted to intricate discussion of abstract ideas.
So you are so right. We need good, targeted pitches and definitions that are carefully crafted to characterize the movement as effectively as possible for the person who may be unfamiliar with or have the wrong impression about EA…and then to take action and use these religiously in presentations, videos and so on. (The “concise” quality of these messages is also key to engaging the listener in that carefully phrased message.)
A few thoughts:
First, in regards to #1, in my months of describing EA to others I find I rely often on pinning down the ultimate goal of EA a little more specifically than merely “doing good” or “helping others”, for example, “supporting life and health and reducing suffering,” or “saving lives, reducing suffering, and helping others live the fullest lives they can, free of poverty.” Might such a phrase be part of a fuller explanation or pitch on EA? It makes the helping more specific and immediate, providing a hook for the emotions.
Second, in regards to Bonus #1 on evidence and reason, to me these are important to mention in explaining that decisions of effectiveness generally deemphasize emotion, proximity, and prominence in the news of the day. My thinking about altruism has changed since encountering EA in part as I now see how causes “close to my heart” loomed large in my past giving. So, as another motivation for mentioning evidence and reasoning, should this be more explicitly mentioned in longer pitches?
And one suggestion: As an example of a concrete example of effective altruism, Deworm the World might rate a mention (Bonus #3). It brings with it a great narrative about schools and books and teachers, while forcing the listener to consider that the most effective charities may not be the ones that are the most intuitive or best publicized.
As I have learned more about EA, I started to create a table to help me get a broad picture of its many parts and to phrase it ways of thinking effectively. I have showed this to a few people and they thought it *might* be something that could be turned into a resource of some sort. Alternatively, maybe it will be seen as simply rehashing all the introductory materials on EA and therefore not worth much.
So I will link to the diagram here (edit access!) and invite people to make comments on it and/or hack away at it, especially to improve it in light of the considerations in this article. (I will also post it in the Editing and Review Forum.) It’s here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZUcoJ5yP1448TtKZnFD1tRIk7f2Og6qYI7nhNprY494/edit?usp=sharing
Thanks!