I think that EAs generally haven’t pursued media outreach due to considerations such as covered in this post: What to know before talking with journalists about EA. Their worries seem to be mostly related to journalists misunderstanding or misrepresenting what was said, unfavorable quotes, or stories being fitted into a narrative.
I suppose Op-Eds manage to avoid most of these problems and add a lot of credibility to the field. I guess the main potential downside I can see is that we wouldn’t want existential risk to become a buzzword that people start adding to all kinds of proposals that have nothing to do with x-risk. However, it seems unlikely that just a couple of articles would have this kind of effect. So overall, I think having at least a small amount of this kind of work is important as it does improve the credibility of the field.
Thanks for that context and for your thoughts! We understand the worries that you mention, and as you say, op-eds are a good way to avoid those. Most (>90%) of the other mainstream media articles we’ve seen about existential risk (there’s a few dozen) did not suffer from these issues either, fortunately.
I think that EAs generally haven’t pursued media outreach due to considerations such as covered in this post: What to know before talking with journalists about EA. Their worries seem to be mostly related to journalists misunderstanding or misrepresenting what was said, unfavorable quotes, or stories being fitted into a narrative.
I suppose Op-Eds manage to avoid most of these problems and add a lot of credibility to the field. I guess the main potential downside I can see is that we wouldn’t want existential risk to become a buzzword that people start adding to all kinds of proposals that have nothing to do with x-risk. However, it seems unlikely that just a couple of articles would have this kind of effect. So overall, I think having at least a small amount of this kind of work is important as it does improve the credibility of the field.
Thanks for that context and for your thoughts! We understand the worries that you mention, and as you say, op-eds are a good way to avoid those. Most (>90%) of the other mainstream media articles we’ve seen about existential risk (there’s a few dozen) did not suffer from these issues either, fortunately.