I’m curious how much mass outreach there actually _is_ in EA and/or what people have in mind when they talk about mass outreach.
Aside from Doing Good Better and Will/CEA’s other public intellectual work, which they seem to be retreating from, it’s not clear to me what mass outreach has actually been done.
I think this depends on how we define mass outreach. I would consider a lot of activities organized in EA community to be mass outreach. For example, EAG, books, articles in popular media outlets, FB posts in EA group, 80 000 Hours podcast, etc. They are mass outreach because they reach a lot of people and very often don’t enable an in-depth work on. Exceptions would be career coaching session at EAG event and discussing books/articles in discussion groups.
I agree re. books and articles in the mass media- and these are the kinds of things it seems people are stepping back from.
I think of the EA FB group, EAG etc. to be more insider-facing than outreach (EAG used to seem to be more about general outreach, but not anymore).
The 80K podcast is an interesting middle case, since it’s clearly broadcast generally, but I imagine the actual audience is pretty niche and it’s a lot more in depth than any media article or even Doing Good Better (in my view). I have to wonder how far, in a couple of years, people will be saying of the podcast the same things being said of DGB, i.e. the content is sub-optimal or out of date and so we wouldn’t want to spread it around. The same considerations seem, in principle, to apply in both cases, since even if people within the English-speaking world are already locked into some bad ideas, we don’t want to continue locking them into new ideas, which we will judge in 2020 to have been premature/mistaken/sub-optimal.
I’m curious how much mass outreach there actually _is_ in EA and/or what people have in mind when they talk about mass outreach.
Aside from Doing Good Better and Will/CEA’s other public intellectual work, which they seem to be retreating from, it’s not clear to me what mass outreach has actually been done.
I think this depends on how we define mass outreach. I would consider a lot of activities organized in EA community to be mass outreach. For example, EAG, books, articles in popular media outlets, FB posts in EA group, 80 000 Hours podcast, etc. They are mass outreach because they reach a lot of people and very often don’t enable an in-depth work on. Exceptions would be career coaching session at EAG event and discussing books/articles in discussion groups.
I agree re. books and articles in the mass media- and these are the kinds of things it seems people are stepping back from.
I think of the EA FB group, EAG etc. to be more insider-facing than outreach (EAG used to seem to be more about general outreach, but not anymore).
The 80K podcast is an interesting middle case, since it’s clearly broadcast generally, but I imagine the actual audience is pretty niche and it’s a lot more in depth than any media article or even Doing Good Better (in my view). I have to wonder how far, in a couple of years, people will be saying of the podcast the same things being said of DGB, i.e. the content is sub-optimal or out of date and so we wouldn’t want to spread it around. The same considerations seem, in principle, to apply in both cases, since even if people within the English-speaking world are already locked into some bad ideas, we don’t want to continue locking them into new ideas, which we will judge in 2020 to have been premature/mistaken/sub-optimal.