All of Letian Wang's Comments + Replies
So, I am Chinese and have lived in the west for about half of my life, and I think I can contribute a few very personal vantage points.
The Western centric-ness is less about what music the podcast plays or even what intellectual traditions the movement draws its intellectual roots from. It's more about the personality and social dynamics. I'll summarise what makes blending into the community challenging for me. And I'll be very blunt here
- While EAs on average has more intellectual humility than the average person, the white and male overrepresen
Another generally good approach: Avoid big words if you can. Uncommon words are much harder for non native speakers to comprehend even if we know the word. Often I found myself searching in my memory for the word's meaning and missed a whole sentence. It's difficult to do if these words permeate the materials you engage with，but not impossible. Also，don't use the word permeate!
Hi Ben,
As a Chinese national currently living in the west, I think I broadly agree with your argument that "efforts to expand effective altruism into other languages should initially focus on person-to-person outreach to a small number of people with key expertise." I also appreciate your grasp of the complexity of cultural and linguistic barriers in promoting EA ideas in the Chinese context, which can often be lost on EAs who are less familiar with other cultures.
One potential objection to this is that not rushing into massive translation effort...
I'm not pushing back on your comment, nor do I think there's anything wrong with it! In fact, I'm very appreciative of your effort to making a difference.
It's just very interesting that what other people think is the problem and what actually impacts me are fundamentally different. I used to not want to believe that personal experience presents a significant barrier to mutual understanding, but being embedded in a crowd so different from myself really changed my mind on that cosmopolitan pipe dream.
The many subtle ways homogenous groups exclude... (read more)