Many people mentioned comms as the biggest issue facing both AI safety and EA. EA has been losing its battle for messaging, and AI safety is in danger of losing its too (with both a new powerful anti-regulation tech lobby and the more left-wing AI ethics scene branding it as sci-fi, doomer, cultish and in bed with labs).
My sense is more could be done here (in the form of surveys, experiments and focus groups / interviews) pretty easily and cheaply relative to the size of the field. I’m aware of some work that’s been done in this area, but it seems like there is low-hanging fruit, such as research like this, which could easily be replicated in quantitative form (rather than a small-scale qualitative form), to assess which objections are most concerning for different groups. That said, I think both qualitative research (like focus groups and interviews) and quantitative work (e.g. more systematic experiments to assess how people respond to different messages and what explains these responses), is lacking.
I agree. However, I also think that doing more surveys do not prevent the failure mode of EAs “doing comms” as doing more surveys over actual interventions for aligning the general opinion with more rational takes on this particular topic. Shyness and low socio-emotional skills among leaders seems to me commonplace in EA, far too much compared to the rest of the world, up to the point where the best interventions targetting communications skills seems neglected to me.
Skills in communications, and funds for paying skilled individuals responsible for communications in any particular org is, imho, generally lacking. I have eavesdropped to a certain number of (non-sensitive) meetings of a small AIS org, and the general level of knowledge on how to convey any given message (especially outside of EA, especially to an opponent) is, in my opinion, insufficient, despite good knowledge of the surveys and their results. People in this org mostly generated their own ideas, judged them using their intuition, and did them, rather than using established knowledge or empirical expertise to pick the best ideas. Most of the people in the process are AIS researchers with background in CS, rather than people with both a background in AIS and communications, who are also excellent communicators (to a non-EA audience). One person I met openly shared their concern of not having enough funding for paying a PR and Comms responsible, as well as them growing tired of managing something they have no background in. Surveys didn’t really help with this bottleneck.
My fear is that there is not enough money, and that most people don’t care enough because they trust their intuitions too much / are afraid to actualy remedy to this lack of skills and would rather do surveys (on my side, I definitely feel fear and worry about talking to journalists or carefully balancing epistemics whilst not hurting common sense).
My only not-so-real data point is this (compare karma on LW vs EAF for a better sense). In a world where people saw a technical problem in communications, I would have expected this post to have more success. In short, I’d bet that most communications-skills related interventions/hires are usually considered with reluctance.
I do aknowledge that surveys could be an even lower-hanging fruit, of course. But I think that they should not distract us from improving skills per se.
It seems possible that both of these are neglected for similar reasons.
It seems surprising the funding would be the bottleneck (which means you can’t just have more of both). But that has been my experience surprisingly often, i.e. core orgs are willing to devote many highly valuable staff hours to collaborating on survey projects, but balk at ~$10,000 survey costs.
My sense is more could be done here (in the form of surveys, experiments and focus groups / interviews) pretty easily and cheaply relative to the size of the field. I’m aware of some work that’s been done in this area, but it seems like there is low-hanging fruit, such as research like this, which could easily be replicated in quantitative form (rather than a small-scale qualitative form), to assess which objections are most concerning for different groups. That said, I think both qualitative research (like focus groups and interviews) and quantitative work (e.g. more systematic experiments to assess how people respond to different messages and what explains these responses), is lacking.
Caveat: conflict of interest
I agree. However, I also think that doing more surveys do not prevent the failure mode of EAs “doing comms” as doing more surveys over actual interventions for aligning the general opinion with more rational takes on this particular topic. Shyness and low socio-emotional skills among leaders seems to me commonplace in EA, far too much compared to the rest of the world, up to the point where the best interventions targetting communications skills seems neglected to me.
Skills in communications, and funds for paying skilled individuals responsible for communications in any particular org is, imho, generally lacking. I have eavesdropped to a certain number of (non-sensitive) meetings of a small AIS org, and the general level of knowledge on how to convey any given message (especially outside of EA, especially to an opponent) is, in my opinion, insufficient, despite good knowledge of the surveys and their results. People in this org mostly generated their own ideas, judged them using their intuition, and did them, rather than using established knowledge or empirical expertise to pick the best ideas. Most of the people in the process are AIS researchers with background in CS, rather than people with both a background in AIS and communications, who are also excellent communicators (to a non-EA audience). One person I met openly shared their concern of not having enough funding for paying a PR and Comms responsible, as well as them growing tired of managing something they have no background in. Surveys didn’t really help with this bottleneck.
My fear is that there is not enough money, and that most people don’t care enough because they trust their intuitions too much / are afraid to actualy remedy to this lack of skills and would rather do surveys (on my side, I definitely feel fear and worry about talking to journalists or carefully balancing epistemics whilst not hurting common sense).
My only not-so-real data point is this (compare karma on LW vs EAF for a better sense). In a world where people saw a technical problem in communications, I would have expected this post to have more success. In short, I’d bet that most communications-skills related interventions/hires are usually considered with reluctance.
I do aknowledge that surveys could be an even lower-hanging fruit, of course. But I think that they should not distract us from improving skills per se.
It seems possible that both of these are neglected for similar reasons.
It seems surprising the funding would be the bottleneck (which means you can’t just have more of both). But that has been my experience surprisingly often, i.e. core orgs are willing to devote many highly valuable staff hours to collaborating on survey projects, but balk at ~$10,000 survey costs.