(Video) How to be a less crappy person

I did say that it is possible to be non-controversial and reach a large audience (I'm sure it wasn't your intention, but you sort of made it look like I didn't say that).

I was responding literally to your question: "Can a person going with a nice-guy approach really have the same impact as someone being controversial?"

My best attempt to interpret your view was something like "non-controversial content can work, but controversial content is almost always better". My response was to point out that the most successful communicators of EA have typically been "non-controversial" in their delivery, even if some of EA's core ideas are inherently radical. I hope that I spoke to your intended point, and I'm sorry if I didn't.

As someone who is very concerned with animal wellbeing, every person reducing meat consumption is a massive positive.

A few possible responses to this:

• If the goal is to eventually have almost everyone go meatless, there's some value in pushing a message that more people respond to in the long term. Having 10% of the population go meatless for 20 years < having 50% go meatless for 5 years.
  • This model is clearly oversimplified, as a set of initial supporters  might help to convert others — but on the other hand, if you can get a lot of people to spread a message in their "local" setting, shouldn't that message be the one that works on the highest percentage of people, because total reach isn't as much of a concern?
  • The math here is complicated and entirely hypothetical, which means that the more convincing point (to me) is:
• Whichever supporters respond to your messaging are the supporters you end up with.
  • If your brand is controversy, drama, and snark, you get a lot of people who enjoy controversy, drama, and snark.
  • If your brand is positive, welcoming, and low-key, you get some smaller number of people who will tend to be more positive, welcoming, and low-key.
  • Some movements might prefer the former, others the latter. Based on my extremely limited knowledge of the history of social movements, long-term success seems like it usually comes from the latter, since movements built on the former tend to fracture and fragment as they grow. (But I'm well outside my expertise here.)
  • EA, in particular, has a fairly deliberate strategy of trying to recruit people who have a natural tendency toward compassion + "taking numbers seriously", and being wary of the kinds of audiences we can bring in through overconfidence or an appeal to negative emotions. This may have reduced the movement's numerical growth rate, but at the same time, I'm extremely happy with the people who have been drawn to it so far, many of whom came in explicitly because EA stood out from the crowded field of "social movements using controversy to persuade".
    • A related story: I was a semi-professional Twitch streamer throughout 2020. I purposefully avoided discussing the day's biggest video game-related controversies during my streams.
    • This may have lost me the chance to have a clip go viral, and my audience never reached the size of the audience for the most infamously controversial streamers — but at the same time, my chat was noticeably more productive (in terms of e.g. strategic discussion) and required almost no moderation. And when I surveyed my audience, many of them said they explicitly enjoyed the stream because it was low-key and avoided drama. Had I tried to compete by offering my own hot takes, I don't know that I'd have wound up with as much success as I had (that's a crowded field, too).

I should also add that sometimes just saying controversial things is useful (such as EA's defending of sweatshops; I've seen so many people, who, even after being explained to why sweatshops are beneficial to people in developing countries, just reject the message).

Isn't this the opposite of the point you were making? If people tend to reject a message after hearing it, that's an argument against using the message. (Unless you left out the part about the message winning over some of the people who hear it in a lasting way; personally, I don't think I've met anyone in EA for whom that message was especially important.)

After one of his speeches went viral, not only did it spread all over the internet amassing tens of millions of views, but it went viral in Israel, and it's credited with converting roughly 10% of their population to veganism/vegetarianism.

Credited by whom?

The numbers I found after a quick search indicate that fewer than 10% of Israelis claim to be vegetarian, and self-reported vegetarianism is often inflated (either by survey response bias or by people who are confused about whether e.g. fish counts as meat).

The Hebrew version of the video has just over a million views, which would be 1/8 of Israel's population. (Some may have seen the English-language version, but non-Israelis may have watched the Hebrew version.)

If roughly 10% of the country's population went vegetarian because of the video, this implies that the prior rate of vegetarianism was almost 0, and that almost every person who saw the video made a permanent change to their diets. I don't find either of these claims plausible.

Of course, even with a much lower success rate, the video could still have been a very useful tool — perhaps a win for the pro-controversy side! But I end up not knowing what to think.

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Also, I should emphasize that none of this has anything to do with my opinions about your content — I'm more focused on the general argument at hand, which comes up a lot. I think you should make whatever videos you feel like making (while trying to figure out whether people are responding in the way you'd hope).