Just on whether this is the most serious PR crisis in EA history: it might be, but the most accurate measure of salience / interest I have is Wikipedia pageviews, where it seems smaller than the OpenAI board drama, and much smaller than FTX.
Just to be clear, this is just Wikipedia pageviews?
I suspect they’re telling us something about interest in EA, but I don’t get the sense that the pro-accelerationist MAGA partisans being riled up against EA by the Trump administration are they kind of guys who are going to read the Wiki entry to make sure their hot takes on EA are evidence-based.
Supposedly, people on X generally don’t click links. My guess would be that even fewer are searching on Google/Wikipedia. So I don’t expect these metrics to be super reliable. They might more closely track “fraction of users engaging deeply” than “size of PR crisis”.
Just on whether this is the most serious PR crisis in EA history: it might be, but the most accurate measure of salience / interest I have is Wikipedia pageviews, where it seems smaller than the OpenAI board drama, and much smaller than FTX.
https://x.com/bellaforristal/status/2102305645328208316
Also, zoomed out that far it looks to be ongoing / on the rise. But if you look at the last 30 days it’s gone down a lot. https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/?range=latest-30&project=en.wikipedia.org&pages=Effective_altruism
Bella—interesting data; thanks for sharing.
Just to be clear, this is just Wikipedia pageviews?
I suspect they’re telling us something about interest in EA, but I don’t get the sense that the pro-accelerationist MAGA partisans being riled up against EA by the Trump administration are they kind of guys who are going to read the Wiki entry to make sure their hot takes on EA are evidence-based.
Yeah just Wikipedia pageviews :)
I agree it’s an imperfect proxy, and might be systematically wrong because of dynamics you describe. But it’s the most accurate proxy I know of!
Bella—thanks for the clarification. Appreciate it!
See also Google Trends.
Supposedly, people on X generally don’t click links. My guess would be that even fewer are searching on Google/Wikipedia. So I don’t expect these metrics to be super reliable. They might more closely track “fraction of users engaging deeply” than “size of PR crisis”.