Take some EAs involved in public outreach, some journalists who made probabilistic forecasts on there own volition (Future Perfect people, Matt Yglesias, ?), and buy them their own news media organization to influence politics and raise the sanity- and altruism-waterline.
We could buy (a significant number of shares in) media companies themselves and shift their direction. Bezos bought the Washington Post for $250 million. Some are probably too big, like the New York Times at a $8 billion market cap and Fox Corporation at $20 billion.
I generally agree, although I think these >$1B general audience entities are too expensive for EAs. Whereas I think it would make sense to buy media companies and consultancies that are somewhat focused on global security, AI and/or econ research. e.g. Foreign Policy magazine, Wired, GZero Media. Stratfor. Economist Intelligence Unit, and so on. At least, I think the value of info from trying out buying up one or more smaller entities, to see how one could steer them, or bolster them with some EA talent, could be high—the most similar things I can think of EAs having done previously were investing in DeepMind and OpenAI.
Another way of thinking about this question is—are there other entities that are of less value to invest in than DM/OAI, but more than the media/consulting orgs that I mentioned?
I’m concerned that it would look really shady for OpenPhil to do so, but maybe Sam Bankman-Fried or another very big EA donor could do it—but then the purchaser needs to figure out who to pick to actually manage things, since they aren’t experts themselves. (And they need to ensure that their control doesn’t undermine the publication’s credibility—which seems quite tricky!)
It could only be billionaires who are running out of donation targets. If Bezos can buy WaPo, then less prominent billionaires can buy less popular media with much less (though not zero) controversy. But I agree that it only works well if you have EA-leaning talent to work there, especially at the executive level.
Matt makes lots of money on his independent substack now, so that feels less urgent, but funding other things like future perfect in other news sources as the Rockefeller Foundation does now seems great.
Urgent doesn‘t feel like the right word, the question to me is whether his contributions could be scaled up well with more money. I think his substack deal is on the order of 300k per year, but maybe he could found and lead a new news organization, hire great people that want to work with him and do more rational, informative and world-improvy journalism?
Thanks, didn’t see what he said about this. Just read an Atlantic article about this and I don’t see why it shouldn’t be easy to avoid the pitfalls from his time with Vox, and why he wouldn’t care a lot about starting a new project where he could offer a better way to do journalism.
Yglesias felt that he could no longer speak his mind without riling his colleagues. His managers wanted him to maintain a “restrained, institutional, statesmanlike voice,” he told me in a phone interview, in part because he was a co-founder of Vox. But as a relative moderate at the publication, he felt at times that it was important to challenge what he called the “dominant sensibility” in the “young-college-graduate bubble” that now sets the tone at many digital-media organizations.
Also, the idea of course is not at all dependent on him, I suppose there would be other great candidates, Yglesias just came to mind because I really like his work.
Yeah, I guess the impression I had (from comments he made elsewhere — on a podcast, I think) was that he actually agreed with his managers that at a certain point, once a publication has scaled enough, people who represent its “essence” to the public (like its founders) do need to adopt a more neutral, nonpartisan (in the general sense) voice that brings people together without stirring up controversy, and that it was because he agreed with them about this that he decided to step down.
Interesting, the Atlantic article didn’t give this impression. I’d also be pretty surprised if you had to become essentially the cliche of a moderate politician if you’re part of the leadership team of a journalistic organization. In my mind, you’re mostly responsible for setting and living the norms you want the organization to follow, e.g.
epistemic norms of charitability, clarity, probabilistic forecasts, scout mindset
values like exploring neglected and important topics with a focus on having an altruistic impact?
And then maybe being involved in hiring the people who have shown promise and fit?
Yeah, I mean, to be clear, my impression was that Yglesias wished this weren’t required and believed that it shouldn’t be required (certainly, in the abstract, it doesn’t have to be), but nonetheless, it seemed like he conceded that from a practical standpoint, when this is what all your staff expect, it is required. I guess maybe then the question is just whether he could “avoid the pitfalls from his time with Vox,” and I suppose my feeling is that one should expect that to be difficult and that someone in his position wouldn’t want to abandon their quiet, stable, cushy Substack gig for a risky endeavor that required them to bet on their ability to do it successfully. I think too many of the relevant causes are things that you can’t count on being able to control as the head of an organization, particularly at scale, over long periods of time, and I’d been inferring that this was probably one of the lessons Yglesias drew from his time at Vox.
Wouldn’t they lose readers if they left their organizations? Is that what you mean? The fact that Future Perfect is at Vox gets Vox readers to read it.
In the short term yes, but my vision was to see a news media organization under the leadership of a person like Kelsey Piper that is able to hire talented reasonably aligned journalists to do great and informative journalism in the vein of Future Perfect. Not sure how scalable Future Perfect is under the Vox umbrella, and how freely it could scale up to its best possible form from an EA perspective.
Take some EAs involved in public outreach, some journalists who made probabilistic forecasts on there own volition (Future Perfect people, Matt Yglesias, ?), and buy them their own news media organization to influence politics and raise the sanity- and altruism-waterline.
We could buy (a significant number of shares in) media companies themselves and shift their direction. Bezos bought the Washington Post for $250 million. Some are probably too big, like the New York Times at a $8 billion market cap and Fox Corporation at $20 billion.
I generally agree, although I think these >$1B general audience entities are too expensive for EAs. Whereas I think it would make sense to buy media companies and consultancies that are somewhat focused on global security, AI and/or econ research. e.g. Foreign Policy magazine, Wired, GZero Media. Stratfor. Economist Intelligence Unit, and so on. At least, I think the value of info from trying out buying up one or more smaller entities, to see how one could steer them, or bolster them with some EA talent, could be high—the most similar things I can think of EAs having done previously were investing in DeepMind and OpenAI.
Another way of thinking about this question is—are there other entities that are of less value to invest in than DM/OAI, but more than the media/consulting orgs that I mentioned?
Who should buy them?
I’m concerned that it would look really shady for OpenPhil to do so, but maybe Sam Bankman-Fried or another very big EA donor could do it—but then the purchaser needs to figure out who to pick to actually manage things, since they aren’t experts themselves. (And they need to ensure that their control doesn’t undermine the publication’s credibility—which seems quite tricky!)
It could only be billionaires who are running out of donation targets. If Bezos can buy WaPo, then less prominent billionaires can buy less popular media with much less (though not zero) controversy. But I agree that it only works well if you have EA-leaning talent to work there, especially at the executive level.
Matt makes lots of money on his independent substack now, so that feels less urgent, but funding other things like future perfect in other news sources as the Rockefeller Foundation does now seems great.
Urgent doesn‘t feel like the right word, the question to me is whether his contributions could be scaled up well with more money. I think his substack deal is on the order of 300k per year, but maybe he could found and lead a new news organization, hire great people that want to work with him and do more rational, informative and world-improvy journalism?
I would be extremely surprised if he had any interest in doing this, given what he’s said about his reasons for leaving Vox.
Thanks, didn’t see what he said about this. Just read an Atlantic article about this and I don’t see why it shouldn’t be easy to avoid the pitfalls from his time with Vox, and why he wouldn’t care a lot about starting a new project where he could offer a better way to do journalism.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/substack-and-medias-groupthink-problem/617102/
Also, the idea of course is not at all dependent on him, I suppose there would be other great candidates, Yglesias just came to mind because I really like his work.
Yeah, I guess the impression I had (from comments he made elsewhere — on a podcast, I think) was that he actually agreed with his managers that at a certain point, once a publication has scaled enough, people who represent its “essence” to the public (like its founders) do need to adopt a more neutral, nonpartisan (in the general sense) voice that brings people together without stirring up controversy, and that it was because he agreed with them about this that he decided to step down.
Interesting, the Atlantic article didn’t give this impression. I’d also be pretty surprised if you had to become essentially the cliche of a moderate politician if you’re part of the leadership team of a journalistic organization. In my mind, you’re mostly responsible for setting and living the norms you want the organization to follow, e.g.
epistemic norms of charitability, clarity, probabilistic forecasts, scout mindset
values like exploring neglected and important topics with a focus on having an altruistic impact?
And then maybe being involved in hiring the people who have shown promise and fit?
Yeah, I mean, to be clear, my impression was that Yglesias wished this weren’t required and believed that it shouldn’t be required (certainly, in the abstract, it doesn’t have to be), but nonetheless, it seemed like he conceded that from a practical standpoint, when this is what all your staff expect, it is required. I guess maybe then the question is just whether he could “avoid the pitfalls from his time with Vox,” and I suppose my feeling is that one should expect that to be difficult and that someone in his position wouldn’t want to abandon their quiet, stable, cushy Substack gig for a risky endeavor that required them to bet on their ability to do it successfully. I think too many of the relevant causes are things that you can’t count on being able to control as the head of an organization, particularly at scale, over long periods of time, and I’d been inferring that this was probably one of the lessons Yglesias drew from his time at Vox.
Or indeed experimenting with different incentives in news production. What would EAs do if they all had £10 to spend on news production.
Wouldn’t they lose readers if they left their organizations? Is that what you mean? The fact that Future Perfect is at Vox gets Vox readers to read it.
In the short term yes, but my vision was to see a news media organization under the leadership of a person like Kelsey Piper that is able to hire talented reasonably aligned journalists to do great and informative journalism in the vein of Future Perfect. Not sure how scalable Future Perfect is under the Vox umbrella, and how freely it could scale up to its best possible form from an EA perspective.