Supporting Effective Altruism through spreading rationality

Altruism is, basically, a value and rationality does not tell you which values you should have.

I think the clearer question might be - Does rationality lead to effective altruism?

An easy answer might be rationality applied to altruism might lead to effective altruism; but rationality applied to life might not lead to altruism - and might lead away from it.

For example, I can easily see someone who, on realizing that his past charitable giving was all about sending signals to his social circle, decides just to stop doing it and spend the money on, say, self-learning resources.

Yes this about sounds like me and most people I know, except that we were not giving at all to begin with, but if we did, it would have been signalling.

I don't 100% understand the usual emotional reasons beyond charitable giving. I do get that in the US or parts of it, social pressure and status plays a role.

But probably a more scalable basis is feeling you have a surplus. To scale it up and out, to different cultures etc. you need to convince people they have a surplus they don't need.

One thing that would really help there is if it was really true.

Alternatively, low unit of measure charities. I.e. those who can do something useful with a unit as little as 5-10 dollars/euros. So that contributors feel they did not just add to the sum that makes something happen but they personally did a person something good.

Regard whether spreading rationality contributes to EA directly, I do not have evidence in the sense of data, only in the sense of logic. From a probabilistic thinking perspective, getting people to think more rationally, in an evidence-based manner, about their charitable giving would be likely to lead them to give more effectively, and the EA movement is the best outlet for such charitable giving. I agree there is a danger of the kind you describe about social circle signaling, but we can't be sure without actually testing this with experiments and getting actual evidence about what the world looks like.

Furthermore, as Brian Tomasik describes in his essay, getting people to think more rationally would result in people having better lives overall and flourishing, which is the point of the EA movement as a whole.

So spreading rationality would certainly contribute to the outcome desired by the EA movement, of global flourishing and well-being. I'd also say it would be likely to contribute to the EA movement in particular itself, per my first statement above, but that's a matter of experimenting.

The letter would be passed to people involved in the EA movement interested in knowing about Intentional Insights and our efforts to spread rationality, so they would be heterogeneous but more rationality-oriented than most. But I think you're right about the inferential gap, I'll need to work on rewording that section, thank you!

My goal is convincing people to have more clear and rational, evidence-thinking, as informed by LW materials. Some people may choose to donate to AI, and others to EA - as you can see from the blog I cited, I specifically highlight the benefits of the EA movement. Regardless, as Brian Tomasik points out, helping people be more rational contributes to improving the world, and thus the ultimate goal of the EA movement.

Ouch, you certainly are doing a good job of twisting words and trying to avoid clear and objective statement. If by brainwashing you mean convincing people to have more clear and rational, evidence-thinking, then yes, that's the project I'm talking about.