How to explain Effective Altruism to someone who’s never heard of it—and make them interested?
A few months ago, I was given the opportunity to give a TEDx talk about Effective Altruism.
As a former community manager of EA Israel, I’ve spent years explaining EA to newcomers, refining how I communicate its principles, and observing the common misconceptions that make it harder for people to engage with EA ideas. Preparing for the talk forced me to organize my thoughts on what works—and what doesn’t—when I try to convey EA to a broader audience.
I would love to discuss with you some of the choices I made when I wrote this talk, and hear your thoughts about them.
Note: I don’t read the forum often, so the writing might not be in the usual style of the forum. I use many anecdotes, personal stories, and my views. However, hopefully, these ideas could start a conversation I think is important about EA communication and community outreach in general, and I hope that they could spike that conversation.
1. Generic Examples → Shared personal stories
Like many people, my first experience with social impact was purely driven by passion, and not by calculations of effectiveness. In the talk, I chose to describe this experience. It went something like this:
> “When I was 14, I found out my friend was harming herself. It shook me. I wanted to help her, and other people that suffered.
>
> So I did what felt right—I launched a mental health campaign to reduce self-harm among teenagers.
>
> And, to my surprise, it worked- we received thousands of followers, interviews on TV, and hundreds of messages from people saying how much it helped them. It felt like a success.
>
> Until one day, another friend told me:
>
> “Your campaign gave me the idea to hurt myself.”
>
> She said she had already been struggling with anxiety and depression. But self-harm wasn’t something she’d considered— until she came across our campaign.
>
> It crushed me.
>
> I had tried to do good in th
It's worth noting that a large part of the argument there (but far from all of it) would not apply to this question unless you were in such an influential position that you could have a meaningful effect on whether or not the war took place at all.
So I read Gwern and I also read this Dylan Matthews piece, I'm fairly convinced the revolution did not lead to the best outcomes for slaves and for indigenous people. I think there are two cruxes for believing that it would be possible to make this determination in real-time:
One of my core assumptions, which is up for debate, is that EAs ought to focus on outcomes for sla... (read more)