EA - How EA is perceived is crucial to its future trajectory by GidonKadosh

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: How EA is perceived is crucial to its future trajectory, published by GidonKadosh on July 23, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. In light of the increased attention EA is receiving, there has been plenty of discussions lately about how individuals perceive the EA movement and EA ideas, either non-EAs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) or newcomers (1, 2, 3, 4). Nevertheless, I suspect that the practical aspects of this topic are still underdeveloped, and wanted to describe them in-depth. Summary The way that EA is perceived is tremendously important, especially in light of the increasing public attacks on EA (that I review in this post). There are two separate influences that EA’s perception has on the movement - a large risk, and a large opportunity: The risk is a toxic public perception of EA, which would result in a significant reduction in resources and ability to achieve our goals (and for toxic enough perceptions, could result in movement collapse). The opportunity is higher fidelity movement-building, increased support from decision-makers, solving talent gaps, and improving diversity, all resulting in higher quality resources going into direct work and research. This post provides an analysis of the risk and the opportunity, and ends with several actionable recommendations. Part 1 -The Risk Individual-level perspective There is a wide range of possible negative perceptions of EA. These perceptions are predominantly developed before an individual gets to learn thoroughly about EA, and they disincentivize further learning about EA. For instance, if Bob encounters a local group and finds it to be awkwardly homogenous, gets a feeling of an all-or-nothing culture or a cult, is convinced by an appealing argument that prioritizing is immoral or maybe even that it’s a self-serving conscience-wash for billionaires, Bob is less likely to start enthusiastically reading The Precipice. A possible response to this view is that if Bob develops negative perceptions after very few encounters, he was probably not relevant in the first place to our movement-building efforts. We could expect an EA-Bob to be a critical thinker who's excited enough about doing good that he would try to see through bad norms and learn about the core EA tools. But before judging Bob, we should remember that negative perceptions have both conscious and unconscious effects. On a conscious level, Bob may decide to prioritize his time on things that seem a-priori more helpful or important. On an unconscious level, he might just feel instinctively mistrustful when reading seemingly cult material. To use a slightly extreme example, if I’d ask most people to read a couple of articles about Scientology and “just give it a chance”, they’d feel the same mistrust. The movement’s theory of change is dependent on people Should we care about Bob’s perception even if he was never a good candidate to join the movement? The movement’s Theory of Change relies on people from three different categories of people: People doing direct work: If someone unfamiliar with EA has a bad perception of EA, they likely won't get involved with the movement, and as a result, they’re likely to have less impact if they don’t use the EA toolkit, or if they don’t get the support/network/resources the movement could provide them.Moreover, if someone who is already involved with the community feels that there is a public toxic perception of EA, they might limit their involvement. I’ll later provide illustrations of this case. People in influential positions supporting or enabling direct work: One example could be the possible future funders of EA, which might not trust or want their names/careers to be associated with EA if there’s a public toxic perception around it. Further examples could include the role of decision-makers in policy-related fields: In...