Hello!
It seems to me that the EA community leans towards progressive or liberal political ideologies. This feels especially pertinent within animal advocacy, where moral and cultural disagreements often create barriers to broader acceptance. However, I think it’s an analogous problem within EA and so feel free to weigh in even if animals aren’t your primary concern.
If we agree that engaging more conservatives is desirable, how might we achieve this? Here are a few ideas:
1. Highlight conservative-friendly interventions: Focus on initiatives that align with conservative priorities, such as promoting free-market solutions to factory farming (e.g., supporting cultured meat startups) or emphasizing the health benefits of plant-based diets.
2. Engage conservative leaders: Collaborate with conservative thought leaders, policymakers, and organizations to bridge ideological divides and promote EA principles in ways that resonate with their audiences.
3. Encourage open dialogue: Create spaces within EA for conservatives to voice their perspectives without fear of judgment, and ensure these conversations are framed as opportunities for mutual learning.
Open questions
• Do you think the lack of political diversity in EA and animal advocacy is a significant problem? Why or why not?
• Are there risks to actively recruiting conservatives to the movement, such as diluting core values or sparking internal conflicts?
• What strategies have been successful in building coalitions across political divides in other contexts, and could these be applied to EA?
I’d like to hear your thoughts on this. Does engaging more conservatives represent a meaningful opportunity for animals/EA more broadly, or would it be a distraction?
I think other than the meat one, your along the lines of how some people are thinking, albeit described in a very polemical and pejorative way, that probably isn't particularly fair. But also, a lot of these people see any obviously and transparently "elite" group* as dodgy, not to mention that EAs tend to think like economists and don't want to abolish capitalism which to makes them "neoliberal" to a lot of leftists (not unfairly I don't think, though whether "neoliberalism" in this weak sense is obviously bad and evil is another matter). And as Titotal as already mentioned there are people kicking around the general EA scene with views on race that are to the right of what is acceptable even in some mainstream conservative contexts.
More generally, if you see the left/right division as about whether we want to keep or get rid of current hierarchies, EAs are associated with things the top of current hierarchies-like big tech firms and Oxford University-and don't seem very ashamed about it. And then when we actually think about improving the world "how do we get rid of current hierarchies" isn't usually our starting question. Also, for the sort of leftists who try and explain disagreement with leftism in terms of false consciousness, there seems to be a constant temptation to see anything that isn't explicitly about getting rid of current unjust hierarchies as a ploy to distract people from current unjust hierarchies, especially if it has billionaire backing. (Of course, many things other than EA receive money from >3 billionaires, but are not perceived as "billionaire" backed to the same degree.)
*that isn't humanities profs, but I would argue they aren't really "elite" in the same way as some EA leaders-Holden Karnofsky is married to the President of Anthropic after all, which is a hell of a lot more elite than "went to a fancy grad school, but now teaches history at mid-ranking state uni