Talking about EA with friend who has an intellectual disability — any advice?

I think the child drowning thought experiment in Peter Singer's Famine, Affluence and Morality is great and compelling entry point for people of all walks of life to understand why many EAs are driven to do what they do.

People have different definitions of EA within the EA community. However the definitions that get more buy-in end up getting simpler. I think the lowest-common-denominator definition of EA is that it is both a set of principles and community centered around the belief that 1) we have a moral obligation to do good in the world and 2) we should be very thoughtful about how we do good so that we can end up doing more good.

Maybe intro EA videos like these would be a good starting point?

Another option could be to just give him a basic pitch for EA and then try to answer his questions:

1. You want to help others, and you could motivate this with the drowning child thought experiment, like Yelnats suggested, say.
2. You want to help more people and help others more than less, possibly motivated by excitement or responsibility (e.g. all the extra people you'd let down) or the trolley problem with no default option.
3. You think some ways help others much more than most ways people help, and give some examples.

Not knowing anything else about your friend, CEA intro resources + saying you’d be excited to discuss it sometime sounds like the best bet.

Cruxes here include:

• How deeply does your friend want to learn about EA? They might only want to engage with it for a week or sporadically. Or they may want to know that longtermism is a thing but not go through any (or much) of the moral calculus
• How does their disability manifest? The little bit I know about intellectual disabilities suggests that it’s hard to know in advance how it affects your learning, even for the person who has the disability. Struggling with math and stats is very common so that doesn’t tell me much.

Not knowing either of these makes me suspect you should do the same as usual but mention the community’s not always the best at communicating / makes stuff more complicated than it needs to be

An update: we had a.pretty good conversation last night about EA, and I was able to answer his questions without too much confusion. I also explained the drowning child analogy, but I’ll also look for a video where Singer himself explains it.

My friend expressed some disagreements with EA moral principles (he thinks moral “rules” are purely subjective, made up by those in charge), at least as I explained them. It’s good he seems to be grasping the concepts at least (since I’m not the best at explaining things).

Anyway, thanks so much for your input, all! It was really helpful.

Random somewhat off topic thought: can large language models help summarize/translate documents for those with intellectual disabilities?