Effective Altruism Forum
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by Julian Nalenz
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Building effective altruismEffective altruism messagingJournalismMisinformationMoral advocacy
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This is a linkpost for https://blog.hermesloom.org/p/observing-is-evil

I recently watched this video about Crystal Meth from a rather popular German YouTube channel:

This video showed me again how incredibly necessary a large-scale shift in the attitudes of publishers and content creators is.

You see, most journalism prides itself with objectivity, with facts, with observing and describing.

So many people that publish content (not just journalists themselves) believe that “spreading awareness” is everything they gotta do.

But that’s just evil. It makes readers and viewers feel like everything is fucked up and they deeply understand why things are fucked up and all the different details and nuances of the entire situation, but in the end they are completely helpless and hopeless. By not giving them any further information on how to act, you just make them passive and desensitized. Also see learned helplessness.

If you are just stating facts without even mentioning a single project which actually aims to change something, shame on you. If you don’t use your reach, i.e. thousands or even millions of readers, viewers or community members to intentionally increase the visibility of projects which want to change the status quo, you are actively making the world a worse place, because you are destroying people’s confidence that anything will change, ever.

Some might say: But there are so many awesome newspapers which are also reporting about the good stuff!

That’s absolutely true, and I love these niche publishing outlets. But that’s not what I’m saying.

We need a shift in attitude of every single journalist in the world, because they are the ones writing the content which millions of people consume every day. Even if a single reader gets involved further in a project for the common good which the journalist mentioned in their article, that’s already a win.

It’s so simple to do better: In every article you write, if you write about something bad in the world, in the very last sentence, also mention one or two real-life projects which actively want to change this.

That is, “mix in” the optimism into your usual content.

You don’t mention these projects because the people from such a project wrote to you. You mention them, because you have researched for them yourselves and you see it as your responsibility as a constructive journalist to do your part in unfucking the world.

It doesn’t have to be perfect, and maybe you’ll accidentally promote projects which turn out to be ineffective or even fake in the end. Or some of your readers simply dislike the project you’re mentioning, for whatever reason. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is slowly shifting the attitudes in people for them to realize: “Huh, maybe I could actually spend even just a single hour per week to work on improving something I’m passionate about.”

And if you’re just a reader or other type of consumer of content, just share this post with every journalist you can get hold of! Every word matters.

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