Meme: Valuable Vulnerability
What do LWers think about this concept? What do you think is the main rationale for this idea, and do you think it is a good policy?
“Be A Superdonor!”: Promoting Effective Altruism by Appealing to the Heart
(Cross-posted on The Life You Can Save blog, the Intentional Insights blog, and the Effective Altruism Forum).
This will be mainly of interest to Effective Altruists
Effective Altruism does a terrific job of appealing to the head. There is no finer example than GiveWell’s meticulously researched and carefully detailed reports laying out the impact per dollar on giving to various charities. As a movement, we are at the cutting edge of what we can currently evaluate about the effectiveness of how we optimize QALYs, although of course much work remains to be done.
However, as seen in Tom Davidson’s recent piece, "EA's Image Problem," and my “Making Effective Altruism More Emotionally Appealing,” we currently do not do a very good job of appealing to the heart. We tend to forget Peter Singer’s famous quote that Effective Altruism “combines both the heart and the head.” When we try to pitch the EA movement to non-EAs, we focus on the head, not the heart.
Now, I can really empathize with this perspective. I am much more analytically oriented than the baseline, and I find this to be the case for EAs in general. Yet if we want to expand the EA movement, we can't fall into typical mind fallacy and assume that what worked to convince us will convince others who are less analytical and more emotionally oriented thinkers.
Otherwise, we leave huge sums of money on the table that otherwise could have gone to effective charities. For this reason, I and several others have started a nonprofit organization, Intentional Insights, dedicated to spreading rational thinking and effective altruism to a wide audience using effective marketing techniques. Exploring the field of EA organizations, I saw that The Life You Can Save already has some efforts to reach out to a broad audience, through its Charity Impact Calculator and its Giving Games, and actively promoted its efforts.
I was excited when Jon Behar, the COO & Director of Philanthropy Education at TLYCS, reached out to me and suggested collaborating on promoting EA to a broad audience using contemporary marketing methods that appeal to the heart. In a way, this is not surprising, as Peter Singer’s drowning child problem is essentially an effort to appeal to people’s hearts in a classroom setting. Using marketing methods that aim to reach a broad audience is a natural evolution of this insight.
Jon and I problem-solved how to spread Effective Altruism effectively, and came up with the idea of a catchphrase that we thought would appeal to people’s emotions well: “Be a Superdonor!” This catchphrase conveys in a short burst crucial information about Effective Altruism, namely that one can have the most powerful impact of one’s donations through giving to the charities that optimize QALYs for the most.
More importantly, it appeals to the heart well. Superdonor conveys the feeling of power – you can be super in your donations! Superdonor conveys an especially strong degree of generosity. Superdonor conveys a feeling of superiority, as in better than other donors. In other words, even if you donate less, if you donate more effectively, you can still be better than other donors by donating more effectively. This appeals to the “Keeping Up With the Joneses” effect, a powerful force in guiding our spending.
Just as importantly, “Be a Superdonor!” is easily shareable on social media, a vital component of modern marketing in the form of social proof. People get to show their pride and increase their social status by posting on their Facebook or Twitter how they are a Superdonor. This makes their friends curious about what it means to be a Superdonor, since that is an appealing and emotionally resonant phrase. Their friends check out their links, and get to find out about Effective Altruism. Of course, it is important that the link go to a very clear and emotionally exciting description of how one can be a Superdonor through donating.
Likewise, people should get credit for being a Superdonor through getting others to donate through sharing about it on social media, through talking about it to friends, through getting their friends to go to their local EA groups. Thus, we get the power of social affiliation, a crucial aspect of motivation, working on behalf of Effective Altruism. A particularly effective strategy for social affiliation here might be to combine “Be A Superdonor” with Giving Games, both the in-person version that TLYCS runs now and perhaps a web app version that helps create a virtual community setting conducive to social affiliation.
Now, some EAs might be concerned that the EA movement would lose its focus on the head through these efforts. I think that is a valid concern, and we need to be aware of the dangers here. We still need to put energy into the excellent efforts of GiveWell and other effective charity evaluators. We still need to be concerned with existential risk, even if it does not present us in the best light to external audiences.
Therefore, as part of the Superdonor efforts, we should develop compassionate strategies to educate emotionally-oriented newcomers about more esoteric aspects of Effective Altruism. For example, EA groups can have people who are specifically assigned as mentors for new members, who can help guide for their intellectual and emotional development alike. At the same time, we need to accept that some of those emotionally-oriented thinkers will not be interested in doing so.
This is quite fine, as long as we remember our goal of making the strongest impact on the world by optimizing QALYs through not leaving huge sums of money on the table. Consider the kind of benefit you can bring to the EA movement if you can channel the giving of emotionally-oriented thinkers toward effective charities. Moreover, think of the positive network effect of them getting their friends to donate to effective charities. Think of whether you can make a much bigger difference in doing the most good per energy of effort by focusing more of your own volunteering and giving on EA outreach in comparison to other EA-related activities. This is what inspired my own activities at Intentional Insights, and the recent shifts of the TLYCS toward effective outreach.
What are your thoughts about reaching out to more emotionally-oriented thinkers using these and other modern marketing strategies? If you support doing so, what do you think you can do personally to promote Effective Altruism effectively? Would love to hear your thoughts about it in comments below, and happy to talk to anyone who wants to engage with the Intentional Insights project: my email is gleb@intentionalinsights.org.
Improving the Effectiveness of Effective Altruism Outreach
Disclaimer: This post is mainly relevant to those who are interested in Effective Altruism
Introduction
As a Less Wronger and Effective Altruist who is skilled at marketing, education, and outreach, I think we can do a lot of good if we improve the effectiveness of Effective Altruism outreach. I am not talking about EA pitches in particular, although these are of course valuable in the right time and place, but more broadly issues of strategy. I am talking about making Effective Altruism outreach effective through relying on research-based strategies of effective outreach.
To be clear, I should say that I have been putting my money/efforts where my mouth is, and devoting a lot of my time and energy to a project, Intentional Insights, of spreading rationality and effective altruism to a broad audience, as I think I can do the most good through convincing others to do the most good, through their giving and through rational thinking. Over the last year, I devoted approximately 2400 hours and $33000 to this project. Here's what I found helpful in my own outreach efforts to non-EAs, and lots of these ideas also apply to my outreach regarding rationality more broadly.
Telling Stories
I found it quite helpful to focus much more on speaking to people's emotions rather than their cognition. Now, this was not intuitive to me. I'm much more motivated by data than the typical person, and I bet you are too. But I think we need to remember that we suffer from a typical mind fallacy, in that most EAs are much more data-driven than the typical person. Moreover, after we got into the EA movement, we forget how weird it looks from the outside - we suffer from the curse of knowledge.
[Link] The emotional system (aka Type 1 thinking) might excel at complex decisions
For thousands of years, human beings have looked down on their emotions. We’ve seen them as primitive passions, the unfortunate legacy of our animal past. When we do stupid things – say, eating too much cake, or sleeping with the wrong person, or taking out a subprime mortgage – we usually blame our short-sighted feelings. People commit crimes of passion. There are no crimes of rationality.
This bias against feeling has led people to assume that reason is always best. When faced with a difficult dilemma, most of us believe that it’s best to carefully assess our options and spend a few moments consciously deliberating the information. Then, we should choose the alternative that best fits our preferences. This is how we maximize utility; rationality is our Promethean gift.
[...] it’s only in the last few years that researchers have demonstrated that the emotional system (aka Type 1 thinking) might excel at complex decisions, or those involving lots of variables.
[...]
The latest demonstration of this effect comes from the lab of Michael Pham at Columbia Business School. The study involved asking undergraduates to make predictions about eight different outcomes, from the Democratic presidential primary of 2008 to the finalists of American Idol. They forecast the Dow Jones and picked the winner of the BCS championship game. They even made predictions about the weather.
Here’s the strange part: although these predictions concerned a vast range of events, the results were consistent across every trial: people who were more likely to trust their feelings were also more likely to accurately predict the outcome. [...]
Consider the results from the American Idol quiz: while high-trust-in-feelings subjects correctly predicted the winner 41 percent of the time, those who distrusted their emotions were only right 24 percent of the time. The same lesson applied to the stock market, that classic example of a random walk: those emotional souls made predictions that were 25 percent more accurate than those who aspired to Spock-like cognition.
[...] the unconscious brain is able to process vast amounts of information in parallel, thus allowing it to analyze large data sets without getting overwhelmed. (Human reason, in contrast, has a very strict bottleneck and can only process about four bits of data at any given moment.)
[...] how do we gain access to all this analysis [...]
[...] emotions come in handy. Every feeling is like a summary of data, a quick encapsulation of all the information processing that we don’t have access to. (As Pham puts it, emotions are like a “privileged window” into the subterranean mind.) When it comes to making predictions about complex events, this extra information is often essential. It represents the difference between an informed guess and random chance.
[...] for example, that you’re given lots of information about how twenty different stocks have performed over a period of time.
[...] if you’re asked which stocks trigger the best feelings [...] you will suddenly be able to identify the best stocks [...] your feelings will “reveal a remarkable degree of sensitivity” to the actual performance of all of the different securities.
But this doesn’t meant we can simply rely on every fleeting whim [...] only benefit from the emotional oracle effect when they had some knowledge of the subject. If they weren’t following [...] then their feelings weren’t helpful predictors [...]
[...] our emotions [...] are imperfect oracles [...] a strong emotion is a reminder that, even when we think we know nothing, our brain knows something.
Link: wired.com/wiredscience/2012/03/are-emotions-prophetic/
Study: business.illinois.edu/ba/seminars/2010/pham_paper2.pdf
Marsh et al. "Serotonin Transporter Genotype (5-HTTLPR) Predicts Utilitarian Moral Judgments"
The whole paper is here. In short, they found a genotype that predicts people's response to the original trolley problem:
A trolley (i.e. in British English a tram) is running out of control down a track. In its path are five people who have been tied to the track by a mad philosopher. Fortunately, you could flip a switch, which will lead the trolley down a different track to safety. Unfortunately, there is a single person tied to that track. Should you flip the switch or do nothing?
Participants with one kind of serotonin transmitter (LL-homozygotes) judged flipping the switch to be better than a morally neutral action. Participants with the other kind (S-carriers) judged flipping the switch to be no better than a morally neutral action. The groups responded equally to the "fat man scenario" both rejecting the 'push' option.
Some quotes:
We hypothesized that 5-HTTLPR genotype would interact with intentionality in respondents who generated moral judgments. Whereas we predicted that all participants would eschew intentionally harming an innocent for utilitarian gains, we predicted that participants' judgments of foreseen but unintentional harm would diverge as a function of genotype. Specifically, we predicted that LL homozygotes would adhere to the principle of double effect and preferentially select the utilitarian option to save more lives despite unintentional harm to an innocent victim, whereas S-allele carriers would be less likely to endorse even unintentional harm. Results of behavioral testing confirmed this hypothesis.
Participants in this study judged the acceptability of actions that would unintentionally or intentionally harm an innocent victim in order to save others' lives. An analysis of variance revealed a genotype × scenario interaction, F(2, 63) = 4.52, p = .02. Results showed that, relative to long allele homozygotes (LL), carriers of the short (S) allele showed particular reluctance to endorse utilitarian actions resulting in foreseen harm to an innocent individual. LL genotype participants rated perpetrating unintentional harm as more acceptable (M = 4.98, SEM = 0.20) than did SL genotype participants (M = 4.65, SEM = 0.20) or SS genotype participants (M = 4.29, SEM = 0.30).
...
The results indicate that inherited variants in a genetic polymorphism that influences serotonin neurotransmission influence utilitarian moral judgments as well. This finding is interpreted in light of evidence that the S allele is associated with elevated emotional responsiveness.
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Non-EAs usually give because of the pull of their heartstrings, not because of raw data on QALYs. Telling people emotional stories is a research-based strategy to pull at heartstrings. So I practice doing so, about the children saved from malaria, of the benefits people gained from GiveDirectly, and other benefits. Then, the non-analytically inclined people become open to the numbers and metrics. However, the story is what opens people up to the numbers and metrics. This story helps address the drowning child problem and similar challenges.
However, this is not sufficient if we want to get people into EA. Once they are open to the numbers and metrics through the story about a concrete and emotional example, it's very important to tell the story of Effective Altruism, to get people to engage with the movement. After leading with a story about children saved or something like that, I talk about how great it would be to save the most children most effectively. I paint a verbal and emotion-laden picture of how regrettable it is that the nonprofits that are best able to tell stories get the most money, not the nonprofits that are most effective. I talk about how people tend to give to nonprofits with the best marketing, not the ones that get the work done. This is meant to appeal to arouse negative emotions in people and put them before the essence of the problem that EA is trying to solve.
Once they are in a state of negative emotional arousal about other charities, this is the best time to sell them on EA, I find. I talk to them about how EA offers a solution to their problem. It offers a way to evaluate charities based on their outcome, not on their marketing. They can trust EA sources as rigorous and data-driven. They can be confident in their decision-making based on GiveWell and other EA-vetted sources. Even if they don't understand the data-based analytical methodology, an issue I address below, they should still trust the outcomes. I'm currently drafting an article for a broad media forum, such as Huffington Post or something like that, which uses some of these strategies, and would be glad for feedback: link here.
Presenting Data
A big issue that many non-EAs have when presented with Effective Altruism is the barrier to entry to understanding data. For example, let's go to back to the example of saving children through malaria nets that I used earlier. What happens when I direct people to the major EA evaluation of Against Malaria Foundation, GiveWell's write-up on it? They get hit with a research paper, essentially. So many people who I directed there just get overwhelmed, as they do not have the skills to process it.
I'd suggest developing more user-friendly ways of presenting data. We know that our minds process visual information much quicker and more effectively than text. So what about having infographics, charts, and other visual methods of presenting EA analyses? These can accompany the complex research-based analyses and give their results in an easy-to-digest visual format.
Social Affiliation
Research shows that people desire social affiliation with people they like. This is part of the reason why as part of Intentional Insights, we are focusing on secular people as our first target audience.
First, the vast majority of EAs are secular. This fact creates positive social signaling to secular people who are not currently EAs. Moreover, it is clear evidence that Effective Altruism appeals to them most. Second, network effects cause it to be more likely for people who already became Effective Altruists to cause others in their contact networks to become EAs. Therefore, it pays well and is highly effective in terms of resource investment to focus on secular people, as they can get others in their social circles to become EAs. Third, the presence of prominent notables who are EAs allows good promotion through a desire to be socially affiliated with prominent secular notables. Here's an example of how I did it in a blog post for Intentional Insights.
There are so many secular people and if we can get more of them into the EA movement, it would be great! To be clear, this is not an argument against reaching out to religious EAs, which is a worthwhile project in and of itself. This is just a point about effectiveness and where to spend resources for outreach.
Meta-Comments About Outreach
To do so, I think we need to focus much more efforts - time and money - on developing Effective Altruist outreach and communication. This is why I am trying to fill the gap here with my own project. We haven't done nearly enough research or experimentation on how to grow the movement most effectively through communicating effectively to outsiders. Investing resources in this area would be a very low-hanging fruit with very high returns, I think. If anyone is interested in learning more about my experience here, or wants to talk about collaborating, or just has some thoughts to share better suited for one-on-one than for discussion comments, my email is gleb@intentionalinsights.org and Skype is gleb.tsipursky
In conclusion, I strongly believe we can do much better at our outreach if we apply research-based strategies of effective outreach. I'd love to hear your thoughts about it.
(Cross-posted on the Effective Altruism Forum)