Yeah, I think the tension here is between finding a way to put the motivation that can appeal to all people, and watering it down a bit, or putting it fully in such a manner and accepting that you're only ever going to be speaking to a small portion of people.

Taking only the "most effective" path towards doing good, when that looks like working on top causes or donating a significant amount, just isn't open to 90% or more of the population. Is it really wise to focus a movement so narrowly that you rule out most people in the world being able to find a place in it?

Perhaps a compromise is something like the below, where "do more good" is the motto, but with an emphasis on how big that difference can be.

The very well written Notes on Effective Altruism coheres some thoughts I've had over the years, and makes me think we should potentially drop the "how to do good in the best way possible framing" when introducing EA for the "be more effective when trying to help others" framing. This honestly seems straightforwardly good to me from a number of different angles, and I think we should seriously be thinking about changing our overall branding to this as a tagline instead. 

But am I missing something here? Is there a reason the latter is worse than I think? Or some hidden benefits to the former that I'm not weighing? 

Thanks Mel :) 

Yeah, Oscar captured this pretty well. You say that Giving What We Can is trying to change social norms, but how well is it really being achieved on the EA forum where maybe 70% or more are already familiar?

I support the aspect of creating a community around it, but I also just guess I don't really feel that from seeing emojis in other people's EA Forum profiles? I think you'd focus on other things if creating a community among givers was your goal, and to me this likely just pressures those who haven't pledged for whatever reason into taking it, which might not be the right decision.

I agree that signaling your support for good social norms is a positive thing though, and I feel differently about when this is used on LinkedIn for example. I just don't think these abstract benefits you point to actually cash out when adding the orange emoji to forum profiles.

I honestly don't like seeing it on the forum. It has a virtue singaly sort of feel to me, I guess because I see it's potential for impact as someone who doesn't know about the pledge saying "oh, what's that orange thing all about" and then reading up on it when they wouldn't have otherwise, and I doubt there's many people on the forum who fit that bill.

As a random datapoint, I'm only just getting into the AI Governance space, but I've found little engagement with (some) (of^[1]) (the) (resources) I've shared and have just sort of updated to think this is either not the space for it or I'm just not yet knowledgeable enough about what would be valuable to others. 

 

1. ^{^}

   I was especially disappointed with this one, because this was a project I worked on with a team for some time, and I still think it's quite promising, but it didn't receive the proportional engagement I would have hoped for. Given I optimized some of the project for putting out this bit of research specifically, I wouldn't do the same now and would have instead focused on other parts of the project. 

This is a solid data point so thanks for mentioning it. It is maybe worth mentioning that, as much as Emile and you may be "critical of EA", Emile was formerly quite friendly and you and I are having this conversation on the forum.

I think you're likely both "more EA" than the average person, and definitely more EA than the average detractor that I have in mind. What it means to "be EA" is amorphous and uncertain here, but many people who would consider themselves EAs are also critical of it sometimes.

I'd be interested to see how much Timnit donates, or any of those who wrote the typical SBF articles, but I highly doubt their numbers would look like those above.

I took this as being relative to those detracting, where this isn't to be taken in a pretentious tone dismissing the work of others in the space helping others, but more "those who insult us aren't often aren't really trying to improve the world with us".

How do you balance between epistemic hedging and concise writing? I'm personally finding this a difficult tradeoff to navigate.

This was an absolutely beautiful read, thank you so much for taking the time to write it. I wrote something myself I just put out with some similar thoughts, and just wanted to mark that I found it remarkable to read this after writing it, finding much of the wisdom already contained here.