Pretty much everyone starts off drinking milk, and while adult
consumption varies culturally, genetically, and ethically,
if I put milk on my morning bran flakes that's a neutral
choice around here. If my breakfast came up in talking with a
friend they might think it was dull, but they wouldn't be surprised
or confused. Some parts of effective altruism are like this: giving
money
to
very poor people is, to nearly everyone, intuitively and obviously
good.
Most of EA, however, is more like cheese. If you've never heard of
cheese it seems strange and maybe not so good, but at least in the US
most people are familiar with the basic idea. Distributing bednets or deworming
medication, improving the treatment
of animals, developing
vaccines, or trying to reduce the risk of nuclear
war are mild cheeses like Cheddar or Mozzarella: people will
typically think "that seems good" if you tell them about it, and if
they don't it usually doesn't take long to explain.
In general, work that anyone can see is really valuable
is more likely to already
be getting the attention it needs. This means that people who are
looking hard for what most needs doing are often going to be exploring
approaches that are not obvious, or that initially look bizarre.
Pursuit of impact pushes us toward stranger and stronger cheeses, and
while humanity may discover yet more non-obvious cheeses over time I'm
going to refer to the far end of this continuum as the casu marzu end,
after the cheese that gets its distinctive flavor and texture from
live maggots that jump as you eat it. EAs who end up out in this
direction aren't going to be able to explain to their neighbor why
they do what they do, and explaining to an interested family member
probably takes several widely spaced conversations.
Sometimes people talk casually as if the weird stuff is longtermist
and the mainstream stuff isn't, but if you look at the range of EA
endeavors the main focus areas of EA all have people working along
this continuum. A typical person likely easily sees the altruistic
case for "help governments create realistic plans for pandemics" but
not "build refuges
to protect a small number of people from global catastrophes"; "give
chickens better
conditions" but not "determine the relative moral differences
between insects of
different ages"; "plan for the economic effects of ChatGPT's
successors" but not "formalize what it means for an agent to have a
goal"; "organize pledge drives" but
not "give money to
promising high schoolers". And I'd rate these all at most bleu.
I've seen this dynamic compared to motte-and-bailey
or bait-and-switch.
The idea is that someone presents EA to newcomers and only talks about
the mild cheeses, when that's not actually where most of the
community—and especially the most highly-engaged
members—think we should be focusing. People might then think
they were on board with EA when they actually would find a lot of what
goes on under its banner deeply weird. I think this is partly fair:
when introducing EA, even to a general audience, I think it's
important not to give the impression that these easy-to-present things
are the totality of EA. In addition to being misleading, that also
risks people who would be a good fit for the stranger bits bouncing
off. On the other hand, EA isn't the kind of movement where "on
board" makes much sense. We're not about signing onto a large body of
thought, or expecting everyone within the movement to think everyone
else's work is valuable. We're united by a common
question, how we can each do the most good, along with culture and
intellectual tools for approaching this question.
I think it's really good that EA is open to the very weird, the
mainstream, and everything in between. One of the more valuable
things that EA provides, however, is intellectual company for people
who are, despite often working in very different fields, pushing down this
fundamentally lonely path away from what everyone can see is good.
To continue the metaphor, suppose EA is the dairy industry, and realizes markedly higher profits (impact) the weirder up the dairy ladder a consumer goes (e.g., makes 5x as much from a cheddar consumer as milk, 5x as much from a bleu consumer than a cheddar one, etc.).
What does the extended metaphor suggest about how to market to maximize profit/impact? Obviously you want to make milk, cheddar, bleu, and casu marzu customers feel like welcome members of the dairy empire. Given that the potential market size substantially diminishes as you step up the weird-dairy latter, and the cost of customer acquisition increases, how much of your marketing resources will be spent on promoting each type of dairy?
My guess is that the EA ecosystem under-emphasizes acquiring new cheddar consumers, but I could easily be wrong. My theory is that that the potential market for cheddar is still very large, and that most conversions to bleu will come from the cheddar crowd anyway.
I'm not sure the metaphor holds up.
I imagine there are many more people interested in AI Safety, Biosecurity, Nuclear Risks who would be put off if they had to start by learning about the GWWC pledge.
Kelsey Piper writing about Vox analytics - 'Global poverty stuff doesn’t do very well. This is something that makes me very sad, and it makes my mother very sad. She reads all my articles, and she’s like, “The global poverty stuff is the best, you should do more of that.” I also would love to do more of that. I think it’s a really important topic, but it doesn’t get nearly as many views or as much attention as both the existential risk stuff and sort of the animal stuff and the weird big ideas sort of content.'
Fair point (although Vox's readers may not be representative of all or even most audiences, and pageviews may be only loosely correlated with willingness to commit. I find many things interesting to read and even write about that I wouldnt devote my career or serious money to.).
Maybe it's not true of all potential cause areas, but I think most of them have a range of options from cheddar to maggot cheese. So cheddar does not necessarily imply global health, and maggots don't necessarily imply x-risk.
I think you're maybe treating the "clearly good" / mild end of this spectrum as being specific to global poverty? But I think there's a lot of x-risk work that's towards this end too: reducing the risk of nuclear war, reducing airborne pathogen spread, etc.
But with Jason's extension of the metaphor, I also think maybe Kelsey's audience on Vox wants to be challenged a bit, and the clearly-good stuff is less interesting. But that doesn't mean hitting them with the weirdest ideas anyone within EA is playing with is going to work well! You still need to match your offering to your audience, and balance wanting to introduce stranger things against not overwhelming them with something too different.
I think every cause can be presented normally/weirdly depending on how you do it, it was just in that example Kelsey was discussing global dev and I think a lot of people in EA assume that more people are interested in global development as they are just looking outside their bubble into a slightly larger bubble.
I would agree that it's usually best to introduce people to ideas closer to their interests (in any cause area) before moving onto related ones. Although sometimes they'll be more interested in the 'weird' ideas before getting involved in EA, and EA helps them approach it practically.