MacKenzie Bezos announced in a letter on Tuesday that she had signed the Giving Pledge, a commitment to give half of her $35 billion in assets, or at least $17 billion
[Edit: Savvy] EA outreach here is probably leveraged.
13
0
0
Reactions
0
0
MacKenzie Bezos announced in a letter on Tuesday that she had signed the Giving Pledge, a commitment to give half of her $35 billion in assets, or at least $17 billion
[Edit: Savvy] EA outreach here is probably leveraged.
I'd say that very careful, non-unilateral EA outreach could be leveraged.
I read almost every Tweet where anyone mentions effective altruism. One frequent type of message which makes me wince is when someone @s a very wealthy/famous person something like "have you heard of effective altruism?" when that person mentions charity in any context.
(I'll refrain from linking to any specific examples, but I tend to see it happen at least once a week, and the messages come from many different sources.)
I doubt that any of these Tweets have caused specific problems yet, but if we want very wealthy people to become interested in EA, we should distinguish ourselves from movements/groups that do a lot of random solicitation.
Fortunately, we are at this point well-known enough that a lot of high-net-worth individuals naturally hear about us in the course of looking up giving opportunities, and we have groups like Effective Giving that practice careful outreach to promising prospects. But a sufficiently pushy/annoying message from an individual talking about EA could still create a bad first impression. I'd hope that our first reaction as a movement to news like this would be "what are this person's interests, and is there a way EA can help?" rather than "I wonder how we can get donations from this person?"
(I don't mean to say that your post implies you think in this way -- I'm just taking this chance to lay out something I've seen a lot, and which has been bothering me for a while.)
Note: I work for CEA, but these views are my own.
Thanks for writing this! Poorly judged initial outreach can make later outreach harder, and rich people especially are experienced at having to resist people mooching off them. While I think there is a lot that individual EAs can make good progress on unilaterally, high value outreach suffers much more from the unilateralist's curse, and I think should be left to CEA and other responsible organisations.
Thanks for sharing your views on this. I'm now updating towards the view of "don't tweet wealthy people about EA unless they explicitly ask for donation suggestions."
Here are some past examples of EAs tweeting wealthy people with donation advice:
I think tweeting to Jeff Bezos seems fine, though I'd hope that someone's first response would be "I should make sure Effective Giving saw this" rather than "I should tweet my favorite EA charity at him".
I don't read Ricky Gervais as being entirely unserious, so responding to him might be reasonable. Some considerations I'd make before tweeting at him:
Try to take the perspective of the famous person who will be skimming over replies; what will make them take notice? What would lead them to actually type a response, or want to set up a phone call? What's the best link to send them if they are busy, impatient, unfamiliar with EA, and reading Twitter from a phone on the way to their next gig?
(I'm not arguing any particular position here. Just mentioning some considerations.)
Maybe? Although I think there were some advantages to tweeting him directly:
Still, it might be the case that the best course of action would have been to run it by Effective Giving, either beforehand or in addition.
I think he was partially serious too, but he didn't explicitly ask for suggestions like Bezos did.
He's very pro-animals.
I think they found out about it from my post, or possibly via some other method. There are a number of tweets there by Animal Charity Evaluators, The Humane League, Vegan Outreach, the Nonhuman Rights Project, etc, or from their employees.
As noted above, merely increasing the ratio of EA to non-EA tweet replies would likely increase the probability that it gets his attention. There is of course the possibility that the attention is counterproductive if looks like charity spam.
I agree with all of these! I don't think that you shouldn't tweet directly in the Bezos situation -- it's just a good idea to tell organizations that might be well-positioned to send their own messages, too. My argument was more "watch out for each other's interests" than "leave it to the professionals".