All of Jackson_Sussman's Comments + Replies

How Important do you think appearing as not-weird and well adjusted is to our advocacy efforts?

EA's are known to do some crazy stuff to maximise their impact and I wonder, even if that stuff maximizes their personal impact does it reduce their overall impact by undermining their advocacy.

Basically how significant is the "i wouldn't want to be part of any club that would have you as a member' effect?

0
Austen_Forrester
9y
I don't think the importance of image in advocacy can be overstated. From what I've learned about vegetarian promotion and from my own observations in life, people don't judge things by their merits, they judge them in terms of how cool they are (ie. How much acceptance it has received from others) or how congruent they are with their existing self-image/worldview. I don't think that a person can do “too much” to help others, even if others see it as extremist. I just think that people should keep quiet about actions/beliefs of theirs that could have a negative effect if other people found out about it. Of course nothing is ever cut and dry. There's always the possibility that others will come around. For instance, people may at first feel threatened by someone who is making too big a sacrifice – let's say not having a child so as not to contribute to overpopulation, but then later come to think of it as a good thing once they get accustomed to the idea.
0
RyanCarey
9y
I think we can apply common sense to this question. If you want to appear as a mainstream advocate or fundraiser, and you're staking your reputation on a few unpopular positions, like animal rights or existential risk reduction, then you should be willing to make some compromises in other areas, like your clothes, hairstyle and conversational manner. Also, you might want to remain apolitical. For example, Jaan Tallinn, who founded the file-sharing program Kazaa, doesn't discuss the politics of file-sharing these days, instead focussing on his core business of mitigating existential risk. In contrast, if you want to be a contrarian academic leader like Robin Hanson, then you can talk about anything in order to get attention. This path seems riskier though, as it's much easier to detect whether your personal reputation is growing than to detect whether you are having small detrimental reputational effects diffused over hundreds of other effective altruists. The other thing that I would say is that if you think X is probably very important yet unpopular, and you think that it's best not to advocate X in order to preserve your popularity, this is usually a rationalisation. Because if you want to preserve your popularity while promoting X, it will probably be best to attempt to do so right away. Promoting Y instead will not help with the very important end goal.

Thanks for the feedback everyone!

I think I agree with most of your sentiments. Especially while EA is young and growing I see the importance of maintaining the image of EA as something that anyone can do while living a normal life.

Should we moderate ourselves to help grow the movement?

I've come across this idea before in the EA community and also thought about it a lot myself.

EA's are known to do some pretty "out there" things to maximize their impact. Many of us give far more than 10%. I know someone who lives in a van and is a "freegan" to maximize the amount of cash they have to give. Personally, I live with my parents and have forgone overseas holidays to leave me extra money to give/save. I know that many people who ask me why think I'm crazy even after hear... (read more)

1
Evan_Gaensbauer
9y
First of all, effective altruist organizations, ones that explicitly exist because there effective altruism exists as a social movement, make it their shared mission to make people aware that people can be effective altruists, while still being totally normal. Not, like, even relatively normal, or sort of normal, but not requiring you, yes you, to sacrifice anything major you wanted out of life[1]. The Life You Can Save, Giving What We Can, and 80,000 Hours exist to do this. The Centre of Effective Altruism incubated all these organizations, and now they're starting a special project to build the effective altruism movement, and steer its public image, called Effective Altruism Outreach. It's currently being led by Niel Bowerman. Your comment is one great concern that Effective Altruism Outreach was specifically started to handle. Of course, as effective altruism grows, nobody wants it to become so diluted as a set of ideas that anyone can as validly call themselves an effective altruist as anyone else, without actually doing anything. So, the community itself must reach consensus on some standard, and each individual is responsible for holding themselves to it to maintain the integrity of effective altruism. Rob Wiblin covered this in his keynote address at the 2014 Effective Altruism Summit. As a shorthand, 'anyone giving $10 to Oxfam' was the hypothetical example of what an overly diluted effective altruism might look like. The standard thus far seems to be 10% of lifetime income donated to the most effective charity (one can find). Now, this isn't sufficient, so some caveats and distinctions have to be included, such as: * does this include income before or after taxes? Personally, I would qualify this commitment with what each individual effective altruist honestly tries as hard as they can to figure out what the best charity is given their best estimates and their personal values, even as they differ from those of others. In practice, such research is di
3
AlexCuevas
9y
I don't think it's a matter of reputation as much as a matter of socialization and network building. Humans are at their best when they're interacting with other humans (generally speaking). If your actions based in EA motivations are hurting your personal relationships or your ability to socialize, either by constraining your living situation or by limiting your social interactions due to cost / time considerations, then they may be doing more harm than good. I think building a strong network of friends and colleagues is one of the highest-leverage things you can do, and shouldn't be easily discounted for the sake of simply giving as much money as you can. Similarly, while going overseas for vacation is expensive and bad for the environment, sometimes seeing another place or culture in real life can have a lot of altruism-related benefits. I don't mean this to disparage your particular life choices, but rather to say that a "typical" EA shouldn't be expected to make the same choices, and it shouldn't be implied that making those choices makes you more effective or more altruistic than somebody else who focuses more on network building and travel, for instance.
7
RyanCarey
9y
The question is not going to be whether we should moderate ourselves- yes or no - but when and how much. Moderating yourself, consciously or unconsciously is part of being a functioning human.
6
Owen Cotton-Barratt
9y
Great question. We should definitely consider these reputational effects as they could be large. I'd start by thinking about what portfolio might look best from the point of view of helping to grow the movement well. My guess is that this isn't necessarily having everyone "as normal as possible", but could well be in that direction from where we are right now. Then when we're thinking about deviations we can think about how large the reputational effect is and how large the benefit is. It's actually pretty hard to estimate the size of reputational effect, but we should try. For example thinking about what the effect might be if the whole movement were doing it might be a reasonable first approximation. In some cases that probably underestimates the costs -- if your behaviour is extreme even within the movement, it's more likely to be picked up on and have a high reputational cost. In some cases that may overestimate the costs -- e.g. if the whole movement were vegetarian that might appear weird and discourage growth, but having half the movement be vegetarian probably doesn't. It sounds to me that living in a van is likely to be erring too far on the side of ignoring reputation. In your case, it might be that the best thing to do is to quietly continue not to take overseas holidays, but not talk about it much. Or to only take them occasionally. (Of course it could be that the not taking overseas holidays provides a useful talking point and helps more than it hurts -- it isn't obvious to me, but I'm glad you're at least considering the question.)