How and Why to Make EA Cool
EA has always had a coolness crisis. The name itself is clunky and overly precise. The logo is fine-but-not-great, and the visual branding has never excited anybody. EA orgs have spent over a decade struggling to tell exciting stories or get serious numbers of social media followers.
In short: It’s never been sexy; it’s never been cool.
Maybe you don’t think being cool matters. That’s a fine opinion if you’re ok with EA being a group of 10,000 people, ~70% male and ~75% white, circularly spending Dustin Moskovitz’s money.
But imagine a movement of a million people. A million people donating a percentage of their income to create a community fund as large as Open Phil’s. A million people working at high-impact organizations.
Getting to a million people means being cool in public campaigns. It means cool branding and cool social media posts and cool copy in emails. The unfortunate truth is that the attention economy consumes us, and the world is a popularity contest. EAs often have this dastardly intuition that they can convince people just by being right. I once watched an EA tell a man to rip up his backyard grass and replace it with turf to save billions of insects. The guy told the EA, “You really need to work on your pitch.” The EA looked at him, then pointed at the insect-death Excel spreadsheet he’d made and said, “I don’t need a pitch. This is my pitch.”
Fortunately, the tide is turning. CEA launched a new Instagram account in January that’s putting out some sexy graphics (though the account still has fewer followers than most thirteen-year-olds). 80k is getting millions of views on their very-sexy AI safety videos and has big plans to expand. And Giving What We Can just took a big bet on being cool by hiring me to start a sleek new video program.
The School for Moral Ambition is by far the best example of making impact sexy. SMA launched 8 months ago and already has 67k Instagram followers (20k more than 80,000 hours, the other most followed EA org).
Of course, coolness matters more for these kinds of organizations that are trying to attract a broad following. I don’t know if technical AI safety researchers need to be cool, but coolness is important for advocates and movement builders and anyone engaging with the public in any way at all.
The other piece of good news is that coolness means different things to different people. There’s not just one way of being cool. Liquid Death is cool in an irreverent punk way, but Oatly is cool in a quirky and gentle way. And both are cool even though they’re not 80s-American-high-school-movie cool. Rutger Bregman isn’t anyone’s idea of a jock, but he’s funny and gregarious with a little edge. An organization can also build a cool brand with anybody being individually cool. Tim Cook isn’t cool, but Apple sure is.
Let’s get tactical. How can EA orgs get cooler? Specifically, how can EA orgs make their public campaigns cooler? I got four ideas.
1. Heroes need villains
This is page 2 of the social activism book. It’s page 1 of every book and movie ever written. It’s hard to fuel any movement on love alone.
If you got your secondary education on the EA forum, you might think that god created AI risk and factory farming alongside the sun and the moon. If you really think Sam Altman is going to kill us all, why aren’t you putting his face on a dartboard? Why do EAs never yell about Tyson and Smithfield Foods? EAs get confused and upset when smart people protest for Gaza or march for gun control because these aren’t “cost-effective” cause areas. But can you blame somebody for doing something exciting? Have you ever gone to a protest? That shit is exhilarating. Hating a big corporation is so much goddamn fun. The war against tobacco, for instance, partly campaigned on individual health benefits, but it went all out in villainizing giant tobacco conglomerates because there’s no feeling in the world like being David.
And EA has no shortage of villains. King Leopold colonized and enslaved the Congo. England chopped up Africa and trapped it in a cycle of conflict. Tyson is putting hens in cages. Mark Zuckerberg is accelerating AI development. Oil companies are burning endless carbon, and companies like Amazon have sparked a global wave of consumerism that’s creating the demand for all this cheap oil.
The School for Moral Ambition is a classic case here. Rutger Bregman calls out billionaires diverting resources from cause areas, tobacco companies poisoning millions to death, and companies like McKinsey that are robbing high-impact orgs of talent.
2. Please, for God’s sake, hire non-EA creative talent
EAs get a little obsessed with alignment when hiring. But EA doesn’t have enough people who are truly elite at certain things. How many exceptional actors are EA-aligned? Not enough to fill an entire media movement. How many top-tier videographers and video editors? Not enough to run multiple elite social media campaigns? School for Moral Ambition got cool by hiring the sickest designers and videographers, and editors they could find. They found people who designed at Sweetgreen and edited for MrBeast. There are plenty of talented creatives in the EA ecosystem, but at least for now, the world’s best creative talent lives elsewhere
3. Invest in creatives.
As EA orgs wade into the marsh of video, social media, and other places where coolness matters most, there’s a real possibility that they burn a bunch of time by underinvesting and settling for “good enough.” There are a lot of YouTube videos out there. There are even more TikToks. You are competing for attention with some very entertaining people, and you’re not gonna win by putting somebody in front of an iPhone 14 and having them read Will MacAskill excerpts. Good 15–20-minute YouTube videos cost many thousands of dollars. Good TikToks cost hundreds. Professional content needs videographers and props and lighting and audio. The good news is that good content does really well online. It’s almost impossible to go viral with shitty content, but you can break through with well-made stuff, but if you want to make good TikToks and you don’t know the difference between a shotgun and a dynamic mic, then you need to hire someone who does.
4. Learn to drop the caveats
Epistemic modesty is good. It also makes for terrible copy. It’s hard for something that’s pithy to also be 100% accurate. You might say
GiveWell’s top charities can save a child’s life for $3,000, assuming current marginal cost-effectiveness holds, though this could range from $2,000-$5,000 depending on the country, baseline mortality rates, and metric use (e.g., DALY vs. life-year saved), also noting that expected value calculations may also differ substantially under certain long-termist worldviews
Or you might say
The best charities can save a child’s life for $3,000
One is good for policy memos and internal research. The other is good for mass media campaigns.
This post has plenty on “how to make EA cool”, but the title promised “Why make EA cool” as well. I think the post is a bit light on the why.
There’s been plenty of debate within the community about this. And I think some people really are OK with EA being a group of 10,000 people.
Those people would say that you’re arguing for a low fidelity model of spreading EA ideas, but you haven’t made the case very strongly.
A movement of a million people sounds great.
But if the reality is that those people are ~all donating ineffectively, and working at organisations which actually aren’t particularly high impact orgs, then I suspect that movement is worse than the one we have now (for all its flaws).
For what it’s worth, I think I probably do prefer broader outreach.
And I’d want that outreach to aim to be high-fidelity, but to recognise that we inevitably have to compromise on that to reach more people.
But I don’t think it’s obvious either way.
What the School of Moral Ambition has achieved is impressive, but it’s unclear whether EA should aim for mainstream appeal insofar as SoMA could potentially fill that niche.
”~70% male and ~75% white” — I’m increasingly feel that the way to be cool is to not be so self-conscious about this kind of stuff. Would it be great to have more women on our team? Of course! And for EA to be more global? Again, that’d be great! But talking about your demographics like it’s a failure will never be cool. Instead EA should just back itself. Are our demographics ideal? No. But if circumstances are such that we need to get the job done with these demographics, then we’ll get the job done with these demographics. And honestly, the less you need people, the more likely they are to feel drawn to you, at least in my experience.
“Please, for God’s sake, hire non-EA creative talent” — I suspect this is very circumstantial. There are circumstances where you’ll be able to delegate to non-EA creative talent and it’ll work fine, but there will be other circumstances where you try this and you find that they just keep distorting the message. It’s harder than you might think.
I agree re: 4 though. The expectations re: caveats depend heavily on the context of the post.
Maybe we’re so big on hiring value-aligned media people because we don’t want our movement to get melded back into the morass of ordinary leftist activism!
I agree with some of your points on style / communication—hedging can really mess up the process of trying to write compelling content, and EA should probably be more willing to be controversial and combative and identify villains of various sorts. But I think the subtext that we should specifically do this by leaning more in a standard-left-wing-activism direction risks worsening the crisis of lameness, rather than fixing it.
As other commenters have mentioned, I’d be worried about losing some of the things that make EA special (for example, suffering the same kind of epistemic decay that plagues a lot of activist movements).
But I’m also a little skeptical that, even if EA was fine with (or could somehow avoid) taking the epistemic hit of building a mass movement in this way, the aesthetics of billionaire-bashing and protest-attending and etc are really as intrinsically “sexy” to smart, ambitious young people as you make them out to be. I’d worry we’d create a vibe that ends up artificially self-limiting the audience we can reach. (I’m thinking about how a lot of left wing activism—abolish the police, extinction rebellion climate stuff, gaza protests, etc—often tends to create counterproductive levels of polarization, seemingly for polarization’s own sake, in a way that seems to just keep re-activating the same left-leaning folks, but not accomplishing nearly as much broad societal persuasion as would seem to be possible.)
(re: “EA should probably be more willing to be controversial and combative and identify villains”, my preferred take is that EA should be willing to be more weird in public, to talk seriously about things that seem sci-fi (like takeover by superintelligence) or morally bizarre (like shrimp welfare) or both (like possible utopian / transhumanist futures for humanity), thus attracting attention by further distinguishing itself from both left-wing and right-wing framings, thus offering something new and strange but also authentic and evidence-backed to people who have a truth-seeking mindset and who are tired of mainstream ideological culture-wars. Politically, I expect this would feel kind of like a “radical-centrist” vibe, or maybe like a kind of fresh alternate style of left-liberalism more like the historical Progressive Era, or something. Anyways, of course it takes plenty of media skill to talk about super-weird stuff well! And this vision of mine also has lots of drawbacks—who knows, maybe I have rose-tinted glasses and it would actually crash and burn even harder than a more standard lefty-activism angle. But it’s what I would try.)
I definitely agree that EA should aim to be cooler and more accessible to average people, but you need to be careful. Aiming for maximum virality can come at a cost to truth-seeking and epistemological rigour.
For example, if EA follows your advice and grows to a million members off the back of a “sam altman is a villain” campaign, that campaign will become the source of 99% of EAs members, all of whom will have been preferentially selected for having an anti-openAI stance. If it turns out that openAI is actually good for humanity (somehow), it would be very hard for the cool EA to come to that conclusion.
picking villains comes at some risk to truth seeing sure, but Sam Altman is a pretty slam dunk villain.
breaks down the non profit purpose of openAI
creeps onto Scarlett Johansson in a sickening way
first states me wants AI regulation then spends 10s of millions lobbying against it.
I think Sam Altman can remain an ideal villain even if Open AI does end up being good for the world—that wouldn’t discredit the movement. The guy has so obviously proved his evilness through actions plain for the world to see and in ways understandable to all different types of people.
One thing we could do to help EA seem more cool without compromising at all on truth and intellectual integrity is to emphasize that what we’re doing is actually heroic. Like, we are literally saving lives (bednets) and protecting the helpless (animals) and trying to save the world from potential doom (AI safety).
That leans into our altruist angle. I think we could also lean into the effectiveness angle by comparing ourselves to heroic characters in fiction who use their intelligence to outwit the bad guys. I’m thinking BBC’s Sherlock, Spock from Star Trek, Lelouch from Code Geass, Tony Stark aka Iron Man, HPMOR, etc. In fact, EAs are kinda like combining Tony Stark’s genius with the sense of morality and decency of Steve Rogers aka Captain America.
We are like Lawful Good D&D Paladins in the sense of championing a righteous cause, and D&D Wizards in the sense of using our intelligence to solve the problems.
So, I think we should lean into the idea that being EA is heroic. We’re trying to save the world. Many of us make real sacrifices (10% to charity, veganism, career pivots, etc.) to make the world a better place.
As for villains, I mean, there are many we could point to other than just Altman. Elon Musk is basically a caricature at this point. Not only is he racing to ASI with the least safety of any of the frontier competitors, but as leader of DOGE he cut USAID and essentially killed or at least abandoned all the people depending on that. Another obvious choice would be an unaligned ASI itself.
But I think, it’s actually more important to show us as the heroes we are, than to name villains. People get mad at villains. People connect with heroes.
You might argue with AI safety in particular that it already sounds too sci-fi. I think, we can’t avoid that, and we may as well take advantage of the tropes that our culture has to make the connections that can be made that resonate with people. Heroes saving the world is a lot more exciting and cool a frame than maximizing impact through targeted donations and direct work sounds, but in effect, in the real world, they are the same thing.
This is not PR or spinning facts. At the risk of sounding cheesy, our efforts really are heroic, and we deserve for our society and culture to appreciate that, and recognize that they too, can become heroes in our world.
Agreed.
But now I have to undermine myself by pointing out that the evidence suggests ‘the best charities are 100 times more impactful’ is a more effective tagline than ‘the best charities can save a child’s life for $3,000’ ;)
If any funders are reading this, please let us know if you’d be willing to fund orgs that want to spend more on marketing and communications—EA Netherlands could do with your help. Right now, it’s relatively easy for us to get funding for things that serve the existing community (EAGx, co-working space), but we haven’t yet been successful in getting funding for marketing and communications work. CEA wants to go for growth, but this is hard without the funding.
Welcome to the forum! For videos specifically, John & Hank Green have an enormous number of subscribers, and they’re pretty EA as far as I’m concerned. Just last week their vlogbrothers videos discussed treating tuberculosis in the Philippines.
One thing I’d love to have is an EA Workout Playlist on Spotify. Music is cool. Fitness is cool. I’d love to have that in my daily routine.
Love this framing — in my own EA work I’ve found that leaning into boldness in marketing outperforms caution. Still, I’d be really curious if anyone has data on how coolness affects downstream outcomes — not just reach, but who we attract and any data that might indicate how it shapes culture over time.
As you note, there are different ways to be cool. And I think the way in which EA is sometimes cool is when impressive people sympathetic to EA ideas do impactful things. Like, most of the general public probably wouldn’t say Ezra Klein is cool, but a lot of EAs (and potential EAs) probably would. I think EA’s path to greater coolness—to the extent we think this matters, which I’m not convinced it does—is probably via finding and supporting more smart, likable people who publicly buy into EA ideas while doing high-profile, impactful work.
Word up. EA massively underestimates how much presentation shapes whether ideas hit their target. You can have airtight arguments and still lose the room if the delivery feels waffly and bloodless (as most, but not all, EA presentations do).
I do think your example there is over-promising, however. I’d put it like
Some of the world’s best-proven charities can save a child’s life for $3,000. This is among the highest-impact uses of money we know of. [See our evidence base]
Re: diversity, I don’t put stock in it. There’s nothing stopping brownish women like me from participating.
Speaking of coolness, this may be a very obscure thing, but I remember there was a series of Japanese light novels called Durarara that got turned into an anime. In the story, there’s a group of online do-gooder vigilantes known as “The Dollars” who basically are weaponized 4chan (sorta like Anonymous but sillier and doing things offline) except for good instead of evil. The Dollars would secretly help people and coordinate to fight these IRL gangs in the story, using their numbers and anonymity (unlike the other gangs with colours, The Dollars were “colourless”).
Interestingly, the relative success of the anime led several fans to create copycat websites including this one (password is: baccano), based on the chat website in the story, and fans coalesced around some of them and attempted to mimick The Dollars for a while (mostly while the anime was still airing). Basically, this consisted of mostly idealistic, half-hearted, and not very effective attempts at anonymous acts of kindness called “missions” that would be posted on the Dollars forum. But the fact that this even happened at all, and that the website forum was frequented by fans from all over the world was, to me at least, quite interesting.
I think, in some ways, the EA movement resembles this in the sense of being sorta united around a forum, and consisting of people all over the world trying to do good. The difference is that rather than being an emotional, fun thing based on a silly pop culture reference, EA is very, very serious and focused on real world effectiveness (and is also more top-down).
Perhaps, having some of the stylish fun of “The Dollars” group could help EA reach a crowd that we’d normally never touch. I don’t really know how we’d go about this, but it’s an idea anyway.
Like, I could imagine something along the lines of there being some kind of work of fiction (i.e. a novel, a TV show, maybe a web serial?) that has a bunch of EA characters doing cool things that save the world, that if done well, could be a great recruitment tool of sorts.
Really interesting points! I completely agree that “coolness” matters much more than many EAs realize, especially for advocacy and public engagement. Hiring top-tier creative talent and investing in professional content is key; without it, even the best ideas can get lost in the noise. Also, simplifying messaging for broader audiences (dropping the caveats for public campaigns) is so important you want people to feel the impact, not get bogged down in footnotes.