As a recent entrant to the sphere of rationality and effective altruism, I often wonder if the primarily-nerdy audience & community (which I adore) is less than a boon to the objectives of effective altruism.
If a popularization (through social media platforms such as TikTok) were to happen with EA, would this even be a good thing?
Depends. It could be good, or it could be bad, depending on how you do it.
The examples above are more about popularization of rationality than of effective altruism, but I believe the lesson applies generally. Basically, if the videos are good, they can improve the perception of the cause, but if they are bad, they will make everyone associated with the cause look like a group of morons (or worse, scammers).
So, I would need to see the specific videos first because I express my opinion. Sadly, enthusiasm is not a guarantee of quality.
In the meanwhile, these are nice videos related to effective altruism:
How to Eradicate Global Extreme Poverty
How One Career Can Save a Million Lives
Apologies for my brevity. I understand this forum has a high standard of quality it expects from its posts, but I’ve not really put in the time to make a full essay out of this.
I’m currently working on building up an EA-adjacent community; the purpose of this is to make it more “palatable” to career-focused types. I want to create a community that someone can look at and go “wow, this will help me land a higher-paying job” and then transition that into genuine optimism & action towards creating a better future.
I’ll try it out for a month or three, and if this seems to be getting traction, will provide an update. :)
That sounds exciting, thank you for your effort!
It is difficult to say in advance how things will turn out. Intentional Insights seemed like a cool organization at first, but they turned out to be more like spammers, their messaging was more clickbait than rationality, and they actually advertised themselves rather than effective altruism. On the other hand, at first I was skeptical about Rational Animations, I was not impressed by their first videos, but step by step these guys improved dramatically, and their latest videos are awesome.
The risk is that this may attract people who are only interested in the higher-paying job… but are happy to say all the right keywords if it makes you help them. If you get visible, you get visible for the bad people, too.
I think we already had a situation at some rationality meetups that some people figured out that if they push the right buttons, they could extract some free work. “Hey, I have this idea of a web application that could make lots of money, so if you guys write the code for me, I will totally donate a part of profits to EA causes.” And the naive people are happy to start working for free for someone they don’t know at all, in return for a promise that is neither written down nor specific enough to be enforceable in any way. So if the person later just walks away and they don’t hear about them anymore...
That didn’t happen in my city, so I don’t know how this story ends. (My guess would be that most of these projects probably failed anyway, considering that the business plan was “I will extract free work from strangers and hope they will build something profitable for me”.) My point is just that from the predator’s perspective “a group of young idealistic people” sounds like “yummy food”. And “effective altruism” sounds way more yummy than “rationality”, although the latter sounds like a more promising source of programming skills.
(A different story that did happen in my city was that a guy offered some assistance with organizing the local effective altruist community, but what happened instead was that he stole the funds and stopped communicating. I am not at liberty to disclose the details; I was not among the victims, and they may choose to take legal action, so I don’t want to interfere. I am just saying that we announced a meeting of effective altruists, less than 10 people came, and 1 of them already came with the intention and a plan to steal money from the rest.)
So, you may want to put some thought into how to make sure (or rather, how to increase the probability) that the people who come will genuinely be interested in philanthropy, as opposed to merely willing to say the right words if it helps them get a better job. Past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior, so maybe it would make sense to gently find out whether people already did something altruistic in the past.
My personal opinion is that someone who says “I am not helping anyone right now, because helping only makes sense when you are rich, but when I get rich, I will definitely help” most likely won’t do anything, no matter how rationally their opinions may sound, simply because (a) no matter how rich you are, you could always be more rich, and (b) people who genuinely feel the desire to help others will do so once in a while, regardless of how small-scale and ineffective it is, because people usually become altruists first and start caring about effectiveness later. And people who don’t have money, such as students, can still help by donating their work or skills.
Sorry if this sounds too pessimistic. I actually believe that most people are good, but the problem is that one bad person can ruin the experience for many.