Why you’re not hearing as much from EA orgs as you’d like

Hi everyone — I wanted to update you about the sorts of communication you’ll expect to hear from EA organisations and their leaders, and why this will probably be an intensely frustrating situation for all involved. For those that don’t know, I’m head of communications at CEA, and am working on Effective Ventures’ response to the current situation.

In particular, I expect that in the short term you’ll get a lot less communication about things than you’d want. This is for a few reasons:

  • Legal risk. It’s likely that there will be extensive legal proceedings around FTX that will drag on for a very long time. This means that anything that is said by anyone who is even tangentially involved is at risk of being scrutinised and multiply interpreted by dozens of people, including people whose role (rightly) is to advocate for their clients or those they represent.

  • Lack of information. Everything has happened very quickly, and everyone is still trying to gather facts and figure out what’s going on. We don’t even fully know what we don’t know. So we’re figuring out things as we go, and don’t want to share information that might later turn out to be inaccurate.

  • This is compounded by the fact that everyone is incredibly busy and dealing with a ton of different things (legal, financial, operational, management) all at once.

This sucks. I really want to be saying everything on my mind right now, and I would love for other people at EA orgs to do the same. I also want to try to make sure people don’t say things they’ll regret in the years to come. But these are hard tradeoffs, and I’m not sure we’ll always get them right.