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.
You need more emojis and memes.
Sounds like a joke, but it's serious. My theory of politics is that basically all politics are identity politics. 'Identity politics' has traditionally been used to mean things like "Black person cares about race issues' or 'Woman cares about women's issues', but I think it goes beyond that. Tribalism is infecting virtually everything we do and every issue we care about, and when you get separated into tribes you develop identities. 'Neoliberal' and 'Socialist' are identities today, there are people who strongly identify as those things, whose sense of self is defined by them to some extent. 'Trump fan' is an identity. 'Coal miner' and 'Gun owner' and 'Anti-racist' and 'Bayesian statistician' and 'Breastfeeding mother' are identities. Every single one of these groups has their inside jokes, their memes, their semi-religious hero figures and iconography, their organizations, their hated outgroup, etc.
One thing that I really believe is that for a movement to grow, there has to be a coherent sense of identity uniting members of the movement. You can get a little ways purely on ideas and convincing people with long explanatory argumentation, but only a little. To grow further you've got to make people want to be part of the organization on a tribal level, to not just agree with you but identify as you. And one of the primary ways to do that is silly memes, insider jokes and symbols you all use together, etc. Group identifiers.
Even Julia Galef, leading rationalist/EA spokesperson, wrote a book about how to be a more rational thinker... and ended up endorsing identity formation. The entire point of The Scout Mindset is to stop letting your identity do your thinking for you, which I agree with... but in the end you can't really escape the pull of identity unless you start to develop an identity as 'the sort of person who doesn't get sucked into tribal politics'. Galef calls this 'developing the Scout Mindset', which I would call identifying as a Scout.
So I'm very serious when I say that the lack of an EA emoji identifier to put in your twitter handle is holding you back. I really believe that matters. Neoliberals are globes. The DSA has the red rose. YIMBYs have the Avocado. Urbanists use a crane or a building emoji. There are specific emojis for crypto fans, Georgists, social democrats, free trade lovers, and even more niche topics. Why not EA?