EA “civilisational epistemics” project / org idea Or: an EA social media team for helping to spread simple and important ideas
Below I describe a not-at-all-thought-through idea for a high impact EA org / project. I am in no way confident that something like this is actually a good idea, although I can imagine it being worth looking into. Also, for all I know people have already thought about whether something like this would be good. Also, the idea is not due to me (any credit goes to others, all blame goes to me).
Motivating example (rough story which I haven’t verified, probably some details are wrong): in the US in 2020 COVID testing companies had a big backlog of tests, and tests had a relatively short shelf life during which analysis would still be useful. Unfortunately, analysis was done with a “first in first out” queue, meaning that testing companies would analyse the oldest tests first, often meaning they wasted precious analysis capacity on expired tests. Bill Gates and others publicly noted that this was dumb and that testing companies should flip the queue and analyse the newest tests first (or maybe he just said that testing companies should be paid for “on time delivery of results” rather than just “results”). But very few people paid attention, and the testing companies didn’t change their systems. This had very bad consequences for the spread of the pandemic in the US.
Claim: creating common knowledge of / social media lobbying pressure related to the right idea can make the right people know about it / face public pressure, causing them to implement the idea.
Further claim: this is a big enough deal that it’s worth some EA effort to make this happen.
The suggested EA project / org: work to identify important, simple, and uncontroversial ideas as they arise and use social media to get people to pay attention to them.
There’s already Kurzgesagt, which is a bit further along the spectrum towards ‘deep engagement’ which I think is really good and gets funding from the Gates Foundation.
Development Media International (DMI) is a non-governmental organization with both non-profit and for-profit arms that “use[s] scientific modelling combined with mass media campaigns in order to save the greatest number of lives in the most cost-effective way”.
The lobbying pressure seems more important than the common knowledge.
EA orgs already spend a lot of time identifying and sharing important and simple ideas — I wouldn’t call them “uncontroversial”, but few ideas are. (See “building more houses makes housing cheaper”, which is a lot more controversial than I’d have expected before I started to follow that “debate”.)
I do think it would be worth spending a few hours trying to come up with examples of ideas that would be good to spread + calculating very rough BOTECs for them. For example, what’s the value of getting one middle-class American to embrace passive rather than active investment? What’s the value of getting one more person vaccinated?
Development Media International is the obvious parallel, and the cost-effectiveness of using ridiculously cheap radio advertisements to share basic public health information seems hard to beat on priors. But there are a lot of directions you could go with “civilizational epistemics”, and maybe some of them wind up looking much better, e.g. because working in the developed world = many more resources to redirect.
(Speaking of which, Guarding Against Pandemics is another example — their goal isn’t just to reach a few specific politicians, but to reach people who will share their message with politicians.)
Is this the sort of thing where if we had, say, 10 − 100 EAs and a billion dollar / year budget, we could use that money to basically buy the eyeballs of a significant fraction of the US population? Are they for sale?
For a billion dollars, you can buy hundreds of millions of eyeballs.
As an extreme example, a 30-second Super Bowl advertisement costs just under $6 million and reaches almost 100 million people. And that can’t be anywhere near the upper limit of efficiency (I’d guess those ads are wildly overpriced given the additional status/prestige they confer).
It depends what media type you’re talking about (audio, video, display, …) - $6m/100m is $60CPM (‘cost per mille’), which is certainly above the odds for similar ‘premium video’ advertising, but only by maybe 2-5x. For other media like audio and display the CPMs can be quite a bit lower, and if you’re just looking to reach ‘someone, somewhere’ you can get a bargain via programmatic advertising.
I happen to work for a major demand-side platform in real-time ad buying and I’ve been wondering if there might be a way to efficiently do good this way. The pricing can be quite nuanced. Haven’t done any analysis at this point.
EA “civilisational epistemics” project / org idea
Or: an EA social media team for helping to spread simple and important ideas
Below I describe a not-at-all-thought-through idea for a high impact EA org / project. I am in no way confident that something like this is actually a good idea, although I can imagine it being worth looking into. Also, for all I know people have already thought about whether something like this would be good. Also, the idea is not due to me (any credit goes to others, all blame goes to me).
Motivating example (rough story which I haven’t verified, probably some details are wrong): in the US in 2020 COVID testing companies had a big backlog of tests, and tests had a relatively short shelf life during which analysis would still be useful. Unfortunately, analysis was done with a “first in first out” queue, meaning that testing companies would analyse the oldest tests first, often meaning they wasted precious analysis capacity on expired tests. Bill Gates and others publicly noted that this was dumb and that testing companies should flip the queue and analyse the newest tests first (or maybe he just said that testing companies should be paid for “on time delivery of results” rather than just “results”). But very few people paid attention, and the testing companies didn’t change their systems. This had very bad consequences for the spread of the pandemic in the US.
Claim: creating common knowledge of / social media lobbying pressure related to the right idea can make the right people know about it / face public pressure, causing them to implement the idea.
Further claim: this is a big enough deal that it’s worth some EA effort to make this happen.
The suggested EA project / org: work to identify important, simple, and uncontroversial ideas as they arise and use social media to get people to pay attention to them.
Really good idea and I think spreading socially useful information is really underexplored.
Maybe one could even think about more broad generalizable bite-sized memes that are robustly good for everyone to know and one should spread.
Some examples:
Germ theory
Pigouvian Taxes
Personal finance (e.g. Index funds)
Cost-effectiveness analysis
Health behaviours
Maybe there should be a DMI-like organization that does that.
Maybe effective would be either very visual ways of spreading these messages within a few seconds (e.g. https://edition.cnn.com/videos/entertainment/2020/03/17/scrubs-14-year-old-clip-infection-spread-mxp-vpx.hln ).
There’s already Kurzgesagt, which is a bit further along the spectrum towards ‘deep engagement’ which I think is really good and gets funding from the Gates Foundation.
Nice!
What does DMI stand for?
Maybe Development Media International? It was a standout Givewell charity for a while.
Development Media International (DMI) is a non-governmental organization with both non-profit and for-profit arms that “use[s] scientific modelling combined with mass media campaigns in order to save the greatest number of lives in the most cost-effective way”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_Media_International
https://www.givewell.org/charities/DMI-July-2021-Version
Oh cool, thanks!
They are to many DMI meaning like “Development Media International”, “Desktop Management Information”, “Deferred Maintenance Item”..
More of them look there : https://acronym24.com/dmi-meaning/
The lobbying pressure seems more important than the common knowledge.
EA orgs already spend a lot of time identifying and sharing important and simple ideas — I wouldn’t call them “uncontroversial”, but few ideas are. (See “building more houses makes housing cheaper”, which is a lot more controversial than I’d have expected before I started to follow that “debate”.)
I do think it would be worth spending a few hours trying to come up with examples of ideas that would be good to spread + calculating very rough BOTECs for them. For example, what’s the value of getting one middle-class American to embrace passive rather than active investment? What’s the value of getting one more person vaccinated?
Development Media International is the obvious parallel, and the cost-effectiveness of using ridiculously cheap radio advertisements to share basic public health information seems hard to beat on priors. But there are a lot of directions you could go with “civilizational epistemics”, and maybe some of them wind up looking much better, e.g. because working in the developed world = many more resources to redirect.
(Speaking of which, Guarding Against Pandemics is another example — their goal isn’t just to reach a few specific politicians, but to reach people who will share their message with politicians.)
Is this the sort of thing where if we had, say, 10 − 100 EAs and a billion dollar / year budget, we could use that money to basically buy the eyeballs of a significant fraction of the US population? Are they for sale?
For a billion dollars, you can buy hundreds of millions of eyeballs.
As an extreme example, a 30-second Super Bowl advertisement costs just under $6 million and reaches almost 100 million people. And that can’t be anywhere near the upper limit of efficiency (I’d guess those ads are wildly overpriced given the additional status/prestige they confer).
It depends what media type you’re talking about (audio, video, display, …) - $6m/100m is $60CPM (‘cost per mille’), which is certainly above the odds for similar ‘premium video’ advertising, but only by maybe 2-5x. For other media like audio and display the CPMs can be quite a bit lower, and if you’re just looking to reach ‘someone, somewhere’ you can get a bargain via programmatic advertising.
I happen to work for a major demand-side platform in real-time ad buying and I’ve been wondering if there might be a way to efficiently do good this way. The pricing can be quite nuanced. Haven’t done any analysis at this point.