I hear your concerns, and thank you for sharing them!

I think the issue of "making everything about altruism" is an important one to address. However, we seem to have different takes on how to go about this.

Let's take a bird's eye-view of our society. Currently, we have the consumer industry predominating our cultural space. The consumer industry creates a hedonistic treadmill around all aspects of our lives, including holidays. Valentine's Day is a classic example of a Hallmark Holiday, popularized by the consumer industry to inspire the population to buy stuff.

Now, I see our goal as trying to channel people's money into effective charity instead of consumerism. By comparison to the messages of consumerism out there, we're a tiny drop in the bucket. If we get even a bit more of our message out there, it would be a wonderful thing, I think. This article is an example of an effort to redirect a tiny proportion of that huge Valentine's Day spending into effective charities.

You postulate that for people who aren't EAs, this seems spammy. I would love it if that was the case! It would mean they were regularly exposed to such messages. From an effective giving marketing perspective, it would be a dream scenario. It's also incredibly unlikely to happen, given the current systemtic incentives.

Now, you might mean that it feels spammy to you. Might it be that you're more exposed to such messages than most people? I know that already a number of people indicated to me they will pursue this course of action. How much money has already been redirected toward effective charities because of that?

Here's some further evidence. Judging by the fact that this post got 500 FB likes the first day it was posted on The Life You Can Save Blog, which is followed by EAs and non-EAs, people are not finding it spammy. Note, the baseline for posts on TLYCS blog is about 100-200 likes over their lifetime, not the first day.

Here's another piece of evidence. It was just accepted for publication to The Plain Dealer, the 16th largest newspaper in the US. They would be highly unlikely to accept anything their audience would find as spammy.

Finally, regarding romance. This is something on which people will differ. If altruism doesn't float someone's romantic bubble, well cool - no pressure. For me, and potentially many others, it does. Regarding romance, I think of it as a feeling that I want to help the other person have a great life, be happy, and flourish, and a confidence that they want the same for me, with sex thrown in. That's perfectly compatible with altruism for me, but different people define romance differently :-P

Hope that helps relieve your concerns, and much appreciate you raising these issues!

Assuming that the EA forum is mostly read by EAs, I would concede that it’s rather redundant here, but I think it’s written with a different audience in mind anyway.

I see great potential in the typical EA messaging that signals being scientific, objective, and cerebral, which is probably also what I found attractive from the start. This sets it apart from the usual charity fundraising messaging. Whereas the usual charity pamphlet would show one child or cat and give them a name and a story, the EA pamphlet would cite papers on the identified victim effect and scope neglect.

But most EA outreach already follows that strategy, and it has been working well, for example for the EA Foundation, for recruiting the sort of people to whom this type of messaging appeals. What Gleb is trying here – or at least that is one aspect of InIn’s current experiments as I understood it – is to appeal to the people for whom this messaging doesn’t work, because all these other charities would probably have given up on their strategy long ago if it weren’t sufficiently effective. This type of audience is probably not found in this forum (and good arguments have been put forward that it’s not the right messaging for growing the movement), but they are probably the majority of the readership of the newspaper outlets that InIn is publishing in. Thus the article can build rapport with people whose instrumental value for EA is probably lower but who maybe make up for it with their numbers. I’m highly unsure about whether this is the case, but it’s the context in which I read the article.

And from that perspective I think it works. Romantic is probably for many people (at least for me ^^) not an unchanging attribute but something that is susceptible to social proof. When an author first manages to signal to the readers that they’re like them (and some degree of authority comes automatically with publishing in a newspaper), and then relates their experiences with romantic donation situations, it’s not so much a suspicious, spurious observation about supposed convergence but a normative influence. If this influence is net good in the end, I’m all for it. There may still be an opportunity cost to Gleb’s work, but if there is, I think Gleb is well qualified to find out, so that the value of information should make up for it.

In this context I don’t see a great danger of spamminess reflecting badly on EA either; rather I’m worried that the article won’t stand out among all the other messaging from charities and for-profits that product X and activity Y are sooo romantic according to the most relateable celebrity they could hire. People already get so much of that that it’ll get mentally spam-filtered long before they read to the EA part or even past the headline, and if they do it won’t stand out either.

Also upvoted, mostly because I’m curious about the result of InIn’s experiment.