More generally I think EA should have an all or nothing approach to news cycles
I don’t think we should care most of the time, but occasionally there comes a news cycle which is close enough to our work to warrant quick blog publications, op-eds, media appearances.
To me, this feels like one of those.
I am confused that I’m not seeing EA articles on this topic. If we don’t push for the “how to best spend $6Bn to combat global povery” which news cycles do we act on?
Lots of EAs, myself included, did nontrivial actions during covid. I expect many of us will act again in once-in-a-decade news cycles that correlates strongly with expected real changes on the real world.
”Powerful people have a spat on Twitter”, while occasionally important, are usually part of the same phenomenon that other fake news cycles come from, and it’s probably more important for us to focus on the things that matter in normal reality, with some distance away from social reality.
EDIT: tbc, “fake” is meant to modify “news cycles” and not “news”, so I’m referring to fake news cycles, and not fake news cycles.
I agree. For me this was a news cycle to act on rather than pass but I I could be wrong.
I imagine we agree that most news cycles should be ignored.
An advantage of 80k not seeing itself as a traditional news org is that it doesn’t chase news cycles and make a fool of itself. I think that’s a good thing.
Agreed. The proper approach is probably to develop a playbook for rapidly evaluating whether or not a news cycle is worth thinking about at all, and then executing on a specific pre-determined plan when it is.
More generally I think EA should have an all or nothing approach to news cycles
I don’t think we should care most of the time, but occasionally there comes a news cycle which is close enough to our work to warrant quick blog publications, op-eds, media appearances.
To me, this feels like one of those.
I am confused that I’m not seeing EA articles on this topic. If we don’t push for the “how to best spend $6Bn to combat global povery” which news cycles do we act on?
Some theories:
- Perhaps noone wants to rush and make mistakes. That’s certainly why I’m not talking about it. But EAs are literally the experts on this.
- Perhaps it’s mainly on twitter. But lots of articles are being written. (https://www.google.com/search?q=elon+musk+6bn&oq=elon+musk+6bn&aqs=chrome..69i57.4031j1j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8) now is the time to publish meta takes “how we would spend 6Bn”
Lots of EAs, myself included, did nontrivial actions during covid. I expect many of us will act again in once-in-a-decade news cycles that correlates strongly with expected real changes on the real world.
”Powerful people have a spat on Twitter”, while occasionally important, are usually part of the same phenomenon that other fake news cycles come from, and it’s probably more important for us to focus on the things that matter in normal reality, with some distance away from social reality.
EDIT: tbc, “fake” is meant to modify “news cycles” and not “news”, so I’m referring to fake news cycles, and not fake news cycles.
I agree. For me this was a news cycle to act on rather than pass but I I could be wrong.
I imagine we agree that most news cycles should be ignored.
An advantage of 80k not seeing itself as a traditional news org is that it doesn’t chase news cycles and make a fool of itself. I think that’s a good thing.
Agreed. The proper approach is probably to develop a playbook for rapidly evaluating whether or not a news cycle is worth thinking about at all, and then executing on a specific pre-determined plan when it is.