Introduction, scoping work

Strategic considerations

Previous sections considered... 'How to get more people to care about '. 'How to get the "Einsteins" of the next generation interested in this.' And 'how do we introduce this to people?'

But, an equally-important concern may be... WHOM do we target? How do we do market profiling? Not just 'what do we present', but 'who do we present it to'

In this section, we cover the limited work that has been done on this, and the scope to do more.

Scoping and considering the value of doing this

Leander Rankwiler's recently (17 Feb 2023) did a scoping exercise for this. See "Detecting affinity for the ideas of effective altruism on social media". This work focuses on "the rationale, literature research, and data collection", and comes to relatively negative conclusions ("it's much less valuable to pursue than previously assumed"). This particularly reflects concerns that doing, publicly reporting, and acting on this research to 'target promising groups' may do some harm (see fold).

Downside risks (Rankwiler)

• Risk of harming the diversity (of personalities) within EA, by targeting the "typical" EA personality.

• "Risk of negative public perception of the method of using personality traits to find promising users (à la Cambridge Analytica)"

He also sees many sources of (statistical) bias in any feasible analysis.

In the sections below, we present and link recent and ongoing direct work that may also be relevant and informative.

leander_profiling_Project1_final.pdfDropbox