Thanks to Aaron Gertler for inviting me to do this AMA.
My name is Jeremiah Johnson, and I'm one of the founders and directors of the Neoliberal Project. The Project is a organization dedicated to advancing liberalism with thousands of members and 70+ chapters around the world. You can find the quick version of what we believe here or here (happy to go into more detail). I help run the Project day to day, host the Neoliberal Podcast, and do basically anything/everything else including social media, political commentary, content creation, managing local chapters, etc.
Aaron was kind enough to invite me here because the EA and neoliberal online communities have a surprising amount of overlap. I've been personally involved in the EA movement in a number of ways. I created a series of charity drives on the neoliberal subreddit that have in total raised more than 1/3 of a million dollars for EA favorites like DeWorm The World and Against Malaria Foundation. I've interviewed EA-related guests on my podcast like Alvin Roth, (Nobel winning economist who created the algorithms for kidney swaps) Robert Wiblin (of 80000 hours), Rob Mather (CEO of Against Malaria), etc. I donate a portion of my salary to GiveWell recommended charities every year, and two years ago I donated a kidney to a stranger after some EA-aligned people convinced me that it was a good choice (I had a popular AMA on donating a kidney here, but happy to answer any questions here as well).
Ask Me Anything about:
- Purely EA topics like
- Kidney donation - either the policy side or my personal experiences going through the process
- Raising money for AMF, and why I like malaria bednets so much
- The intersection between the neoliberal community and the EA community
- Why I think politics is an underrated way to do good that the EA community sometimes overlooks
- The Neoliberal Project, neoliberalism, politics or political philosophy, etc.
- Or anything else that seems relevant or that you're curious about.
There's a private facebook group you can sign up for that has some pretty solid EA memes . I love it, but I always figured it was private for a reason -- EA is full of lots of counterintuitive philosophical ideas that people find off-putting (like... utilitarianism alone is already off-putting to most normies), and EA seems to be very obsessed with having a good/prestigious reputation as a responsible, serious movement. Our jokes are mostly about how weird EA is, so we might want to keep our jokes to ourselves if we are desperately trying to seem normal to everyone else.
It's certainly an interesting contrast with r/neoliberal, where dank memes somehow coexist side by side with long, earnest "effortposts" in the style of The Economist or D.C. think-tanks.
I think part of the difference is that memes are an underdog strategy -- hence the effectiveness of right-wing memes around 2016 and the idea that "the left can't meme". Jokes have always been used to poke holes in the logic of the ruling ideology, hence the epic legacy of Russian political jokes. Neoliberalism certainly isn't a complete underdog -- center-leftism broadly is arguably still the dominant global ideology. But they still have lots of opportunities to "punch up" at contradictions in the non-neoliberal doctrines of political leaders, major news publications, burdensome laws and regulations, etc.
With EA, it's not clear that there's any ruling ideology for us to try to take down a peg. We could start making fun of ordinary charities like the Red Cross and Salvation Army, but I doubt that would go over well. I think the lack of an external enemy means that most of our memes have to be self-deprecatory (making fun of how weird we are), lest they seem like "punching down" (reveling in how right we are and making fun of ordinary people who don't agree with EA ideas).
But I'm not sure about that theory; hopefully there is some way we can figure out how to harness meme magic. New Cause Area?