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MarsColony_in10years comments on “Be A Superdonor!”: Promoting Effective Altruism by Appealing to the Heart - Less Wrong Discussion
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Once you start trying to appeal to "emotionally-oriented" thinkers (what a euphemism), you start bringing them into your group. Once you bring them into your group, they start participating in creating your group policy. Once they start participating in creating your group policy - you stop being effective, because they don't care about effective, and they outnumber you.
Don't court the Iron Law of Oligarchy so directly. Keep your focus on your organization's purpose, rather than your organization. It will last slightly longer that way.
This is a good point. Perhaps an alternative target audience to "emotionally oriented donars" would be "Geeks". Currently, EA is heavily focused on the Nerd demographic. However, I don't see any major problems with branching out from scientists to science fans. There are plenty of people who would endorse and encourage effectiveness in charities, even if they suck at math. If EA became 99.9% non-math people, it would obviously be difficult maintain a number crunching focus on effectiveness. However this seems unlikely, and compared to recruiting "emotionally-oriented" newbies it seems like there would be much less risk of losing our core values.
Maybe "Better Giving Through SCIENCE!" would make a better slogan than "Be A Superdonor"? I've only given this a few minutes of thought, so feel free to improve on or correct any of these ideas.
I think orienting toward geeks would be good, but insufficient. The whole point I was making above is to appeal to people's emotions to cause them to care about effectiveness. The more emotionally-oriented people will not be good at determining effectiveness. But if we can get them to care about effectiveness, not cute puppies, that's where we can make a huge difference in their spending decisions. They would be highly unlikely to become leaders within EA, but their donations can then be powerfully shaped by EA recommendations