My two cents about influencing people to work on a cause:
Usually, the most effective way to do so is to engage their emotions. Any discussion of existential risk implicitly engages people’s fear, for example. That’s a bit problematic in this case, since they’d be working within a community that tends to disparage signaling emotionalism. My guess is a happy medium is to engage people’s emotions while signaling alliance to rationality. EY’s “rationality dojo” posts are a good example of this, IMHO.
Causes may be general, but actions are specific. If I want to encourage action, therefore, I ought to be as specific as possible about what I want people to do. Often a useful combination is to raise a general problem and suggest a specific action people can perform to avoid it. It helps if the two are actually related in some way, though it’s disappointingly unnecessary in many cases.
Convincing groups is even more effective than convincing individuals, since groups have a way of mutually reinforcing one another. Of course, groups also have a lot more inertia to overcome, for the same reasons.
You don’t “only need to convince them once.” Actual persistent behavior change is not usually a fire-and-forget thing; it’s the result of continual effort. One reason so few people manage it is because we aren’t willing to do the work.
It’s generally considered bad form to talk about human operant conditioning, so I will point out the following ostensibly-irrelevant-to-humans fact about animal operant conditioning for no apparent reason whatsoever: it helps to reward compliant behavior and to not reward non-compliant behavior. (Actively punishing non-compliance has negative consequences in many cases, though.) Also, the more obviously the reward is connected to the behavior (for example, the closer they are in time, and the more reliably the latter entails the former, and the more reliably the absence of one entails the absence of the other), the stronger the conditioning effect.
Another ostensibly-irrelevant fact about animal behavior conditioning is that intermittent reward establishes conditioning that is harder to extinguish. This also allows for shaping—once a pattern of behavior is established, reward only compliance that crosses a certain threshold.
My two cents about influencing people to work on a cause:
I’ve miscommunicated in that most people think I have a particular cause in mind.
Causes may be general, but actions are specific. If I want to encourage action, therefore, I ought to be as specific as possible about what I want people to do. Often a useful combination is to raise a general problem and suggest a specific action people can perform to avoid it. It helps if the two are actually related in some way, though it’s disappointingly unnecessary in many cases.
You don’t “only need to convince them once.” Actual persistent behavior change is not usually a fire-and-forget thing; it’s the result of continual effort. One reason so few people manage it is because we aren’t willing to do the work.
Good points. That sort of implies that you can’t really inspire people to go work on a cause without sticking around to tell them what that entails afterwards.
How helpful do you think it would be to just teach rationality to people for them to do whatever they’re working on now?
My two cents about influencing people to work on a cause:
Usually, the most effective way to do so is to engage their emotions. Any discussion of existential risk implicitly engages people’s fear, for example. That’s a bit problematic in this case, since they’d be working within a community that tends to disparage signaling emotionalism. My guess is a happy medium is to engage people’s emotions while signaling alliance to rationality. EY’s “rationality dojo” posts are a good example of this, IMHO.
Causes may be general, but actions are specific. If I want to encourage action, therefore, I ought to be as specific as possible about what I want people to do. Often a useful combination is to raise a general problem and suggest a specific action people can perform to avoid it. It helps if the two are actually related in some way, though it’s disappointingly unnecessary in many cases.
Convincing groups is even more effective than convincing individuals, since groups have a way of mutually reinforcing one another. Of course, groups also have a lot more inertia to overcome, for the same reasons.
You don’t “only need to convince them once.” Actual persistent behavior change is not usually a fire-and-forget thing; it’s the result of continual effort. One reason so few people manage it is because we aren’t willing to do the work.
It’s generally considered bad form to talk about human operant conditioning, so I will point out the following ostensibly-irrelevant-to-humans fact about animal operant conditioning for no apparent reason whatsoever: it helps to reward compliant behavior and to not reward non-compliant behavior. (Actively punishing non-compliance has negative consequences in many cases, though.) Also, the more obviously the reward is connected to the behavior (for example, the closer they are in time, and the more reliably the latter entails the former, and the more reliably the absence of one entails the absence of the other), the stronger the conditioning effect.
Another ostensibly-irrelevant fact about animal behavior conditioning is that intermittent reward establishes conditioning that is harder to extinguish. This also allows for shaping—once a pattern of behavior is established, reward only compliance that crosses a certain threshold.
I’ve miscommunicated in that most people think I have a particular cause in mind.
Good points. That sort of implies that you can’t really inspire people to go work on a cause without sticking around to tell them what that entails afterwards.
How helpful do you think it would be to just teach rationality to people for them to do whatever they’re working on now?
Well, that is EY’s ostensible purpose with this whole forum, so it’s at least appropriate.