tl;dr:

• I am not sure that the pressure on community builders to communicate all the things that matter is having good consequences.
• This pressure makes people try to say too much, too fast.
• Making too many points too fast makes reasoning less clear.
• We want a community full of people who have good reasoning skills.
• We therefore want to make sure community builders are demonstrating good reasoning skills to newcomers
• We therefore want community builders to take the time they need to communicate the key points
• This sometimes realistically means not getting to all the points that matter

I completely agree that you could replace "jargon" with "talking points".

I also agree with Rohan that it's important to not shy away from getting to the point if it is possible you can make the point in a well-reasoned way.

However, I actually think it's possibly quite important for improving the epistemics of people new to the community for there to be less pressure to communicate "all the things that matter". At least, I think there needs to be less pressure to communicate all the things that matter all at once.

The sequences are long for a reason. Legible, clear reasoning is slow. I think too much pressure to get to every bottom line in a very short time makes people skip steps. This means that not only are we not showing newcomers what good reasoning processes look like, we are going to be off-putting to people who want to think for themselves and aren't willing to make huge jumps that are missing important parts of the logic.

Pushing community builders to get to all the important key points, many bottom lines, will maybe make it hard for newcomers to feel like they have permission to think for themselves and make their own minds up. To feel rushed to a conclusion, to feel like you must come to the same conclusion as everyone else, no matter how important it is, will always make clear thinking harder.

If we want a community full of people who have good reasoning processes, we need to create environments where good reasoning processes can thrive. I think this, like most things, is a hard trade-off and requires community builders to be pretty skilled or to have much less asked of them.

If it's a choice between effective altruism societies creating environments where good reasoning processes can occur or communicating all the bottom lines that matter, I think it might be better to focus on the former. I think it makes a lot of sense to have effective altruism societies to be about exploration.

We still need people to execute. I think having AI risk specific societies, bio-risk societies, broad longtermism societies, poverty societies (and many other more conclusion focused mini-communities) might help make this less of a hard trade-off (especially as the community grows and there becomes more room for more than one effective altruism related society on any given campus). It is much less confusing to be rushed to a conclusion when that conclusion is well-labelled from the get-go (and effective altruism societies then can point interested people in the right direction to find out why certain people think certain bottom lines are sound).

Whatever the solution, I do worry rushing people to too many bottom lines too quickly does not create the community we want. I suspect we need to ask community builders to communicate less (we maybe need to triage our key points more), in order for them to communicate those key points in well-reasoned way.

Does that make sense?

Also, I'm glad you liked my comment (sorry for writing an essay objecting to a point made in passing, especially since your reply was so complementary; clearly succinctness is not my strength so perhaps other people face this trade-off much less than me :p).

Lucky people maybe just have an easier time doing anything they want to do, including helping others, for so many reasons.

I didn't go to an elite university but I am exceptionally lucky in so many extreme ways (extremely loving family, friends, citizen of a rich country, good at enough stuff to feel valued throughout my life including at work etc).

While there is a counterfactual world where of course I could have put myself in a much worse position, it would have been impossible for most people to have it as good as I have it even if they worked much harder than me their entire lives.

Because of my good luck, it is much easier for me to think about people (and other sentient beings) beyond my immediate friends and family. It is very hard to have a wide moral circle when you, your friends and your family are under real threat. My loved ones are not under threat and haven't ever been. I care a tonne about the world. Clearly this is largely due to luck. I have no idea what I would have become without a life of good fortune.

I think it makes sense to try and find people who are in a position to help others significantly even though it is always going to be largely through luck. Things just are incredibly unfair. If they were fairer, effective altruism would be less needed.

It's probably easier to find people who are exceptionally lucky at elite universities.

I do think it makes sense to target the luckiest people to use their luck as well as possible to make things better for everyone else.

The challenge is doing this while making sure a much wider variety of people can feel a sense of belonging here in this community.

I do think we have to be better at making it clear that many different types of people can belong in the effective altruism movement.

Who should feel welcome should they stumble upon us and want to contribute is a much, much larger group of people than to whom should we spend scarce resources promoting the idea that lucky people can help others enormously.

I think part of the answer comes from the people who don't fit the mould who stay engaged anyway because they resonate with the ideas. Because they care a tonne about helping others. These people are trailblazers. By being in the room, they make anyone else who walks in the room who is more like them and less like the median person in the existing community feel like this space can be for them too.

I don't think this is the full answer. Other social movements have had great successes from making those with less luck notice they have much more power than they sometimes feel they do. I'm not sure how compatible EA ideas are with that kind of mass mobilisation though. This is because the message isn't simple so when it's spread on mass, key points have a tendency to get lost.

I do think it's fair to say that due to comparative advantage and diminishing returns, there is a tonne of value to building a community of people who come from all walks of life who have access to all sorts of different silos of information.

Regardless, I think it's incredibly important to not mistake the focus on elite universities for a judgement on whether they deserve to be there.

I think it is actually purely a judgement on what they might be able to do from that position to make things better for everyone else.

Effective altruism is about working out how to help others as much as we can.

If lucky people can help others more, then maybe we want to focus on finding lucky people to make all sentient beings luckier for the rest of time. If less lucky people can help more on the margin to help others effectively, then we should focus our efforts there.

This is independent of value judgements on anyone's intrinsic worth. Everyone is valuable. That's why we all want to help everyone as much as we can. Hopefully we can do this and make sure that everyone in our community still feels valued. This is hard because naturally people don't feel as valued because we all tie our instrumental value to our sense of self-worth even if instrumental value is usually pretty much entirely luck. This is a challenge we maybe need to rise to rather than a tension we can just accept because a healthy, happy effective altruism community where everyone feels valued will just be more effective at helping others. I think it's pretty clear that everyone can contribute (e.g. extreme poverty still exists and a small amount of money still sadly goes a very long way). I know I can contribute much, much less than many others but being able to contribute something is enough. I don't need to contribute more than anyone else to still be a net positive member of this community.

We're all on the same team. It's a good thing if other people are able to do much more than me. . If luckier people can do more, then I'm glad that they are the ones that are being most encouraged to use their luck for good. If those with less luck want to contribute what they can, I hope they can still feel valued regardless.

Hopefully we can all feel valued for being a part of something good and contributing what we can independent of whether luckier people are, due to their luck, able to do more (and therefore might be focused on more in efforts to communicate this community's best guesses on how to help others effectively).