My two cents about influencing people to work on a cause:
I've miscommunicated in that most people think I have a particular cause in mind.
Causes may be general, but actions are specific. If I want to encourage action, therefore, I ought to be as specific as possible about what I want people to do. Often a useful combination is to raise a general problem and suggest a specific action people can perform to avoid it. It helps if the two are actually related in some way, though it's disappointingly unnecessary in many cases.
You don't "only need to convince them once." Actual persistent behavior change is not usually a fire-and-forget thing; it's the result of continual effort. One reason so few people manage it is because we aren't willing to do the work.
Good points. That sort of implies that you can't really inspire people to go work on a cause without sticking around to tell them what that entails afterwards.
How helpful do you think it would be to just teach rationality to people for them to do whatever they're working on now?
Well, that is EY's ostensible purpose with this whole forum, so it's at least appropriate.
I'm putting this through discussion because I’ve never written a main section post before… If you have helpful criticism please comment with it, and if it does well I’ll post it in the main section when I get back from school tomorrow.
Things between the bars are intended to be in the final post, the rest are comments
There’s lots of things which can end the world. There’s even more things which can help improve or save the world. Having more people working more effectively on these things will make the world progress and improve faster, or better fight existential risks, respectively.
And yet for all of my intention to help do those things, I haven’t gotten a single other person to do it as well. Convincing someone else to work towards something is like devoting another lifetime to it, or doubling your efforts. And you only need to convince them once.
So there’s two things I want to learn how to do:
I think that the rationalist community as a whole isn’t particularly good at doing these. Small efforts are made by individuals, but I think that most of the people who do try to do these run into the same problems.
I propose that we do more to centralize and document the solutions to these problems in order for our individual efforts to be more effective. This thread is for people who encounter problems and solutions for convincing other people.