I think possibly the issue is that thereās a lot of effort being put in to manage reputational risks, possibly without quite understanding exactly what the forward-looking reputational risks are (because youāre reacting to bad things that have happened). Thatās got to be really tricky.
To my eye, CEA has repeatedly focused on having good PR, meanwhile Yudkowsky wears a shiny gold hat and talks to Bernie Sanders and has a NYT best seller. Is all of that comms effort working?
I agree the comms is currently not as good as it could be.
I think the massive push to expand effective giving through a large variety of (non-CEA) methods might well take over EA external comms in the next few years. And Iām hoping the effects of that will eventually bounce back and fix CEA. There will just be a lot more comms-understanding EA-committed people in the EA hiring pool.
Iām also very hopeful about NEST, which seems to have understood that things like āhold a Nerdfighters or Kursgesagt meetupā is a thing a local EA group should be doing to attract the people who might become an EA, and is not cringe-bad-wrong-unprofessional.
I think possibly the issue is that thereās a lot of effort being put in to manage reputational risks, possibly without quite understanding exactly what the forward-looking reputational risks are (because youāre reacting to bad things that have happened). Thatās got to be really tricky.
My standard position on reputational risk is as follows.
https://āāwww.lesswrong.com/āāposts/āāSWxnP5LZeJzuT3ccd/āāpr-is-corrosive-reputation-is-not
To my eye, CEA has repeatedly focused on having good PR, meanwhile Yudkowsky wears a shiny gold hat and talks to Bernie Sanders and has a NYT best seller. Is all of that comms effort working?
I agree the comms is currently not as good as it could be.
I think the massive push to expand effective giving through a large variety of (non-CEA) methods might well take over EA external comms in the next few years. And Iām hoping the effects of that will eventually bounce back and fix CEA. There will just be a lot more comms-understanding EA-committed people in the EA hiring pool.
Iām also very hopeful about NEST, which seems to have understood that things like āhold a Nerdfighters or Kursgesagt meetupā is a thing a local EA group should be doing to attract the people who might become an EA, and is not cringe-bad-wrong-unprofessional.