The elephant in the room on this is the possibility of extreme negative media attention. There is massive and routine precedent of this.
People in positions of authority seem to have concluded that the prospects of big media attention outweigh the risks, and they know things we don’t so maybe it isn’t an atrociously terrible idea. For example, large numbers of people might actually read the book, which might overcompensate for all the damage from all the shallow criticism that pops up. Or maybe they concluded that the constant shallow criticism might be due to bad luck rather than concerted efforts, and noone ever explicitly said that they’ll do bad things in retaliation if EA suddenly expands, so it doesn’t make sense to assume the worst and hide under a rock. Probably something significantly more complicated than any of those things, though.
People have tried to counteract shallow criticism clickbait articles and have written some pretty good stuff making it pretty clear that those clickbait articles are total garbage, but the nature of clickbait and social media and journalism-in-general means that basically everyone who sees the clickbait article will never ever see the other side of the story. This post covers the problem really well:
The communications team lives and breathes this stuff, and opening up their sensitive work to outsiders might not be the best approach.
Something that would probably help is stuff that could rapidly boost the reputation of ea in an uncontroversial way, such as short-sleeper genes. Stuff that random people could take one look at and reflexively think “that’s weird, but clearly worth some research”. Sending charity money overseas instead of locally is not one of those things.
The elephant in the room on this is the possibility of extreme negative media attention. There is massive and routine precedent of this.
People in positions of authority seem to have concluded that the prospects of big media attention outweigh the risks, and they know things we don’t so maybe it isn’t an atrociously terrible idea. For example, large numbers of people might actually read the book, which might overcompensate for all the damage from all the shallow criticism that pops up. Or maybe they concluded that the constant shallow criticism might be due to bad luck rather than concerted efforts, and noone ever explicitly said that they’ll do bad things in retaliation if EA suddenly expands, so it doesn’t make sense to assume the worst and hide under a rock. Probably something significantly more complicated than any of those things, though.
People have tried to counteract shallow criticism clickbait articles and have written some pretty good stuff making it pretty clear that those clickbait articles are total garbage, but the nature of clickbait and social media and journalism-in-general means that basically everyone who sees the clickbait article will never ever see the other side of the story. This post covers the problem really well:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/eegyf9b6jj4nCbGWs/ea-in-the-mainstream-media-if-you-re-not-at-the-table-you-re
The communications team lives and breathes this stuff, and opening up their sensitive work to outsiders might not be the best approach.
Something that would probably help is stuff that could rapidly boost the reputation of ea in an uncontroversial way, such as short-sleeper genes. Stuff that random people could take one look at and reflexively think “that’s weird, but clearly worth some research”. Sending charity money overseas instead of locally is not one of those things.