Rob—this is an excellent clarification; thank you. I agree that there are these three orientations in some tension within EA, and that it’s important to be honest about some of these trade-offs, and their implications for the future social and intellectual and ethical norms in EA.
I guess I’m mostly in the first camp.
I’m also sympathetic to taking PR issues seriously—but I think some EA organizers have sometimes been rather inept and amateurish at handling the PR issues, and aren’t working with an accurate model of how PR crises flare up and die down, or of how much to say, and what to say, when the crises at at their peak.
IMHO, we need to realize that any sufficiently large, powerful, and well-funded movement (like ours) will reliably and frequently experience PR crises, some of which arise from deliberate PR attacks from individuals or organizations hostile to our mission.
That will be the new normal. We’ll have to learn to live with it, and to have the PR crisis response teams in place to deal with it. And we’ll need the emotional resilience to accept that not everyone will like, love, or respect what we do—and that’s OK.
Rob—this is an excellent clarification; thank you. I agree that there are these three orientations in some tension within EA, and that it’s important to be honest about some of these trade-offs, and their implications for the future social and intellectual and ethical norms in EA.
I guess I’m mostly in the first camp.
I’m also sympathetic to taking PR issues seriously—but I think some EA organizers have sometimes been rather inept and amateurish at handling the PR issues, and aren’t working with an accurate model of how PR crises flare up and die down, or of how much to say, and what to say, when the crises at at their peak.
IMHO, we need to realize that any sufficiently large, powerful, and well-funded movement (like ours) will reliably and frequently experience PR crises, some of which arise from deliberate PR attacks from individuals or organizations hostile to our mission.
That will be the new normal. We’ll have to learn to live with it, and to have the PR crisis response teams in place to deal with it. And we’ll need the emotional resilience to accept that not everyone will like, love, or respect what we do—and that’s OK.